The best way to grow your business through referrals, quickly, is to work with highly connected people. The problem is, those people aren’t always easy to spot. It’s not necessarily the most “powerful” person in the room. The best-connected person is the person who knows everybody!
If you create a friendship, and hopefully a business relationship with these people… they are the people that will go out of their way to promote you. It’s their personality.
So, whenever you are in a room with people for social or networking purposes… it pays to get to know the person in the room, that knows the most people. Here’s a simple and easy way to do it.
- Find any person in the room to begin a conversation with, let’s say it’s Bob… during the conversation ask him if he knows anybody else in the room.
- Next, go to the person Bob identified and strike up a conversation with that person. Simply say, “I just finished speaking with Bob and he suggested I introduce myself…”
- During that conversation, ask them if they know anybody in the room, besides Bob.
- Repeat this process until the same name(s) come up once or twice.
- These names have an over 90% chance of being the best-connected people in the room due to a phenomenon called the “Friendship Paradox”.
Do your best to connect with these people conversationally and find out a bit about them. Make sure you send a “Nice to Meet You”, handwritten card to them, the next day. Then, a few days later, give them a call and ask them to breakfast or lunch. And finally, connect with them on LinkedIn… but only after the handwritten note and lunch invitation.
Otherwise, if you go straight to LinkedIn, they will feel as if you only view them as a business opportunity… instead of someone you think highly of and would like to know better.
People that you like… like you. People that like you, will be much more likely to introduce you to others. It’s those introductions that will make your business grow.
