DIRTY 30 – The Problem With Most Marketing Methods

So here's the problem. Marketing can be really tough when you don't know where to find your prospects or reaching them is really, really expensive. Here's a guy Rod Drury who used to sell Xero direct to business owners. So Xero is an accounting software for small businesses and he started selling to small businesses. I used to work with Rod in Wellington New Zealand. And then I realized there was a far easier way because it was far too expensive and time consuming trying to make one sale at a time.

So all he needed to do was to get the accountants to act as a sales force. So rather than selling direct, they went through a channel. So I want you to imagine for a minute there are six people in the world that could refer you more quality clients than you could possibly handle. Because I think that's the truth. There are six people out there who could refer you more clients than you could possibly handle. You may not know who they are at the moment, but that's going to be your job in this exercise.

I'm going to show you a way to flesh them out. We call these people your super six. Now in working with architects over the last few years, I found that some of them get a very high percentage of their business off referrals. Like most of them get a large percentage of referrals. Now a few of them get almost all of their business off one or two people. Now it's often builders just out of interest. I know one lady in Melbourne who gets 80% of her business through one builder. You might say that's kind of risky and I did too. Right? I said you need at least three or four of these builders of this quality and this type who are sending these referrals so you're not under risk.

But the point is you can get a lot of referrals from one or two people, but let's go for six. So the super six are your power referrals. Okay, they are the influencers maybe. There are people out there who are already talking, selling and advising the people you're trying to reach every single day. The exact type of people you're trying to reach. Now maybe we don't need to try and find the clients. Maybe we just need to find the influencers.

So these super six are in a position to effortlessly send you highly qualified clients and leads or prospects or projects or opportunities if they want to. If they want to. So who are these super six? Now for you because I want you ultimately to have six people who are constantly referring you people. We have to go through a little process. Now it is simple. I told you this is a very simple thing and it's easy to understand. You've got execute it.

So who are the super six? You may already know some of these people. Some of these people may already be sending you referrals already. Others you may need to get to know. It may take you six months to come to find out who your super six is. But it is so worth it. But we need to start now. It's not going to happen overnight.

So the first concept we need to understand is what I call the dirty 30. And the main reason in call it the dirty 30 is number one, because it rhythms. But two, it's also ... we need to target 30 people if we're going to end up with six. So who are the people who could or should be referring people to you? They could be or they should be because of their position. They're in a position where if they wanted to they could send you more business than you could handle. This is the exercise. So these 30 people are already speaking remember? They're already influencing the type of clients you want to reach. Who could they be?

They could be past clients, okay, so I want you to write down a list of your past clients. They could be dirty 30 members. They could be town planners. They definitely could be builders. I found from my experience talking with architects that builders seem to be the best referral source if you've got a good relationship with a couple of builders. Engineers. Or they could be other architects with an overflow. They don't do the type of work but they do get let's say you do residential and you've got to deal with some commercial architects who often get asked about residential work but they don't want to do it. Or they're too busy. So referrals can come from other architects.

So start thinking, forming your list and obviously one group that should be on your list is people who have already referred you clients in the past. So what I'm going to do is form a list of 30 people who could or should be referring people to you. That's the first step. Now obviously people who have referred people in the past need to be on that list. And here's what the list looks like. You're going to download a sheet that looks a lot like this only it won't have Jane Smith, Jack Jones and Richard Petrie. It is unlikely I will refer you anyone. But it's for exhibition purposes only.

You're going to form a list and you're going to track how many referrals you get from each person. Okay? And by the end of say six months or 12 months, you're going to see once you've got 30 people on that list, you're going to find out that 20% of them are actually sending people your way and 80% of them aren't. But we need to know who the super six are so that we can look after them a little better.

Okay, so a good plan violently executed now is building the perfect plan next week. So what we need to do is put together this plan here with a little bit of violence. This is what we're saying here a little bit of urgency. A little bit of determination. All right, communicate. So once we've got a list of 30 then I would start a communication plan to these 30 people. Now we don't know which of the 30 are going to end up as your super six to be perfectly honest. We don't know. We just know that all 30 could or should be sending people your way.

What we're going to do is we're going to share a little bit of love over them for the next 12 months and we're going to find out which ones bear fruit. So effectively we're filtering, okay? We're going to filter your dirty 30 to find the clean six or the super six. So we know that 20% will bear fruit. And then we find the tree that bears the fruit. Right? We know not all 30 are going to end up referring to you. You're not going to get one referral from 30 people. Probably what you're going to do is get 30 referrals from six people.

So why only 30? Why don't we go for 100? Well the answer is we need to keep it simple. We need to keep it simple and we don't want to be overwhelmed. We want to keep it cheap and easy. Okay, so bear in mind. We're not just going to communicate to these people once. We're going to do it every month for the next year and possibly for the rest of your career. Or if I was doing it for the rest of my career.

And just why? Because these people are in a position to see clients my way. That's me, I'm speaking in the first person. These clients, these people are in a position to seeing clients my way if one, they remember me. And two, they want to. So we have to stay in touch. We have to communicate with them. That's what friends do. You may not know some of these people and some of these people may not know you yet. But we need to establish a relationship.

Now, how do we establish a relationship? Well obviously there is a hierarchy of how humans interest best. How do we bond the quickest? Well face to face is obviously the best. Face-to-face contact engages more of the senses. It's more personal, more respectful and more emotional. People feel more obliged to help you when you've met face to face. Okay? That is the king of building relationships and rapport obviously. Distance may make the hat grow fonder for a short time. But let's face it, in the end long distance relationships don't work. Trust me I've tried it. Anyway, face to face does have a problem though. 30 is too many to meet up with every month and we want to stay top of mind with these 30 people. We need to stay top of mind because before they even want to refer us to us they've got to remember us, right?

So the next best thing we need a leveraged communication tool. So I'm going to take you through in the next video a communication tool which I think is the best way to go. You are going to meet with people but you are going to have this as the [inaudible 00:08:44] every single month. It's going to be simple. It's going to be effective and it may get you results in the first month. I know Craig from Sydney had results right from the first month but I'm really looking at this as slightly longer term approach that will work for you.