This is the latest book by John Jantsch author of Duct Tape Marketing and well known small business guru.

The purpose of the book is to educate you on the best ways to build your business or at least a large proportion of your business around referrals from friend, clients, prospects suppliers and strategic partners, you basically create a strategy for referrals.

The book is a fast and enjoyable read – it’s not particularly Americanised as many of these book are.  The tips, advice, processes and steps are equally applicable in the UK or indeed anywhere else in the world as they are in the US.

The introduction tells you the book will “show you how to craft a strategy that compels customers and partners to voluntarily participate in your marketing, to create positive buzz about your products and services to friends, neighbours and colleagues.

John warns that this isn’t a weekend project but something that will require you to look at your business and marketing in an entirely new way.

That said, let’s get on with the main points in the book.

There are 13 chapters which are broken down between 1-30 pages long.

In chapter 1, “Realities of the referral” we are educated on the why and how people are wired to make referrals.  Many of us find great satisfaction in being recognised as a source of good information and having the ability to connect people.

The author suggests that people don’t talk about boring businesses – and by extension you need to provide a service or product tgat generates a level of interest to make people talk about you and want t refer.

This chapter provides several real life examples (which is a theme throughout the book) of companies who use referrals as their main tactiv for business generation and shows how they do it and how it works for them.

We move on to chapter 2 entitled “The Qualities of referrals”.  “Trust is the most important reason people refer you and conversely lack of trust is the main reason they don’t”.  John stresses that transparency and honesty are key to building a base of people who actively want to talk about you.

This chapter is mainly about staff, your service and the importance of delivering your service the right way and keep to your promises.

It’s important to have systems, however it’s crucial that your team can operate out-with the system at times to make sure the Client is happy.

Chapter 3 – “The path to referral”.

This is where you start to apply the way of working to your business.

Content, context, connection and community are some of the keywords in this chapter.

A lot of this effectively revolves around the social media, engaging with people already providing expertise and advice, becoming part of various online and offline communities, educating people.

In summary people see you making a commitment to them, they will most likely (at some point) make a commitment to you.

There are seven stages to referral development which John goes in to detail on and tells you why they are crucial and where they fit in.

Chapter 4 “The referral system view”

Here we start to define our ideal customer and our core talkable difference.

The difference between us and our competitors really needs to be something that gets people excited, something so special that they can’t help but talk about it – A nice feature is simply not enough here.

Next we define our ideal customer.  The main learning here is the irony that being more selective on the Clients we engage with, helps your business grow faster and better via referrals.

You can’t be all things to all people so don’t try to be.  It’s a bit of the pareto law of 80/20 I guess.

John goes on to talk about different types of customers, i.e. every day customers and strategic partners etc.

Chapter 5 is “Your authentic strategy”

This provides more than a dozen elements to mix and match for your referral strategy from TIHWDIH to Things that nobody else does to Open book management, this chapter us packed wuth plenty to think about.

Moving on to Chapter 6 we come to “Content as a marketing driver”

This covers the increasingly obvious fact that traditional marketing no longer achieves the same results, i.e. advertising, cold calling etc.

People look to pull information to them as opposed to it being pushed to them now.  Creating content, helping to educate Clients, making it easier and readily available so they come looking for you when they have a need is part of the key to this chapter.

We reach the halfway point in the book at chapter 7 which is titled “Convergence strategies”

In summary we go through the process of defining your online and offline strategies here. 

Optimising your content, developing your social networking strategy including blog, twitter, facebook and so on.   Using podcast and video amongst others ways to reach out and connect with potential Clients.

We reach “Your customer network” in chapter 8.

Some headlines from this chapter include:

• Exceeding expectations
• Status updates for Clients
• Reward Clients who refer you most
• Create a customer bill of rights – let customers know what they should expect when they do business with you.

The “Strategic partner network” is chapter 9.

In essence this chapter is built around deciding what you want from your strategic partner.  How best to educate them on what you do and how you do it.

You need to also make sure you want to work with them and pass business to them if possible as it’s a partnership, so it shouldn’t be regarded as one way traffic.

What will you do to make sure they look at working with you as a direct benefit to their business?

As we enter the last quarter of the book we reach chapter 10 “Ready to receive”

This related to making sure you are actually ready to receive a referral.

John says there is a bit of an art to this.

People can be reluctant and feel awkward about asking for referrals, however the assumption us that if you’re doing everything in the book the way you should, you will be blowing your Clients away and therefore should be more than happy and indeed very pro-active at asking for referrals.

We’re getting close to the end of the book as we reach chapter 11 “Referral specific campaigns”

Here you get examples of what many companies (two main examples) have done with their referral campaigns – Omaha Steaks and Affordable concrete cutting are the businesses in question.

The examples show fairly simply tactics to get great results.

Chapter 12 is “Snack sized referrals”

This chapter provides referral strategy suggestions for countless different types of business including:

• Lawn service
• Electrical contractor
• Mortgage company
• IT company
• Hair salon
• Shopping centre
• Solicitor
• Dentist
• PR company

There are around 50 examples in total and you can take ideas from all of them and use them directly or mould them in to something that would suit your business and the Clients you want.

Chapter 13 is the final one, “The workshop chapter”

Basically John summarises all the action plans from chapter 5 onwards, it’s a great catch-up and reference point.

Summary:

A thoroughly good book we can all learn from – even if you don’t want to follow every piece of advice or move to a complete referral based business there are still many nuggets in here that you could take in isolation.

One of the many things I like about the book is it gives you a plethora of real examples, it’s not hyperbole, it’s what others are doing in real life, every day and the results they are getting.

For me this make all the difference compared to many other books of this ilk.

At the end of each chapter (from chapter 5 onwards) you are presented with an action plan of what you need to do in order to get you referral based business working and running, what you need to keep on top of and what you should be doing on an on-going basis.

You don’t need a huge budget to dramatically increase your Clients and profits via this strategy.

A well written, well researched book that can definitely make a difference to any business, particularly given the way the marketplace works now and the general apathy towards traditional ways of contacting and pulling in new Clients.

Thoroughly recommended – 5/5