How to make business connections to get qualified referrals

There's plenty of truth to the saying, "It's not about WHAT you know, it's about WHO you know." Especially when it comes to business and sales, the best marketing is word of mouth. Investing...

Full Transcript of The Video

Eric Siu: In this video we're gonna talk about how to make business connections to get qualified referrals. My name's Eric Siu and I'm here to help you grow your business. So the first thing seems like a lot of work, do I want to do this? I just want to stay at home, qualify emails in my boxers. But here's the thing, these things are so high impact that I think everybody should do them. You've got to throw dinners. Dinners with like minded people. Let's say you're starting out. Let's say you are 25 years old, you're looking to get your agency going, whatever it is exactly, you're building software, throw dinners. You want to find like minded people that are maybe around the same level as you, starting out and you guys all kind of grow together.
Now, for me right now I like connecting great marketers together, I like connecting great entrepreneurs together so I just might throw dinners. And sometimes when I'm traveling to speak, I might just get a group of the speakers together and we'll hang out. And those are so impactful. It's not just because I'm looking to get business connections or generate qualified referrals, it's because I'm looking to build relationships with people. Friendships where we can go to a conference like Summit at Sea, for example. Which I guess it's just Summit now because it's not on a boat anymore. But Summit for example, you get all the people together, you hang out and you can do more cool things together.
It's not just about business all the time, but business does happen from these things because these people, they do business, right? People like to do business with people that they know. So think about throwing dinners. And even if you can't throw dinners, well the next thing, point number two, is do one on one meetings with people. Now it's not just, "Hey can I buy you coffee and can I pick your brain for two hours?" No, dude. You can't pick my brain for two hours. You want to make sure there's equal value. You want to make sure that you're adding value to them first.
When I do one on one meetings, I did one with a friend yesterday, but we were talking about different things. We were talking about his business, we were talking about me traveling to Japan soon, we were giving each other value. It's got to go both ways. And if you don't know them yet, well this goes into point number three, which helps with point number two, which actually helps with point number one. If you don't know them, offer them something of value first.
So let's say, for example, I like someone a lot on YouTube. I like their videos. They have a lot of subscribers, they do a video every single day. I know that YouTube's important to them and I know that they care about their viewers. So I might reach out to them and say, "Hey, I really like what you do. Do you want to get on a podcasts? Let's do an interview. We get 70-80,000 downloads a month, give or take. And we have this YouTube channel." And they'll say yes or no. Or you can make it even easier for them. Instead of asking them to commit 30 minutes of their time, you might say, "Hey, I really like what you do. I just want to promote your best video. What's your best video so I can promote it to my email list right now? We have a list of 30,000 people or so."
See, that doesn't require them much work, they can just give you a title and from there you start to build a relationship that way and it starts to continue to build into something else. It starts to snowball into something else. So you have to start with value, you have to lead with value, you have to give more than you take. Give 70% or so and then you might get 30, 40, 50% back in return. You've got to think about that first.
Those are just three ways to get started. And by the way, if you enjoyed videos like this, we've got an entire playlist on how you can do sales in a non-sleazy way. So just click on the link and we'll see you in the next video.

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