Building a referral marketing list

In referral based marketing your list is everything.

If your goal is to obtain most of your business from referrals you have to have a marketing list. In fact you will have more than one list.

The reason I say you will have more than one list is that there are different types of groups of referral prospects and you will be in different stages of your relationship with the people in each group.

Here are some examples.

Groups: prospects, clients, referral partners, vendors, and friends.

Stages: New, recently meet, trying to meet, recently referred someone else, was just referred to you, and established contact but has not referred anyone.

These are not all of the groups or stages your groups can belong to but it should give you the idea.

I think you will find that referral groups and stages of relationship are something that will grow and evolve as your referral marketing plan matures.

The important point is that you spend time on a regular basis refining the groups and stage descriptions for your list(s) and that you are thinking about how you want to talk to each group at each stage.

If you do not have your referral list formalized now is the time to get started.

You will be surprised at the number of names you already have.

• Gather up all of the business cards you have laying around
  
• Go through all of your emails
• Sort through all of your business agreements and applications
• Go through all of the note pads you have

Once you have all of the names and contact information in one place you should divide them into a few basic groups and stages. Use the examples here as beginning suggestions. Don't worry if the groups and stages are not perfect. They never will be. This is something that will change and evolve as your referral marketing plan evolves. The important thing is to get started.

In the next post I will give you some ideas on how to decide what to say to get your referral marketing plan launched.