Marketing How to dig your own well. By Kevin Donlin If like most business owners, you need referrals like a plant needs water. Want to get more referrals faster? Try this: Stop chasing after glasses of water (single referrals), and start digging wells (referral partnerships). the advice of Jim Bear, president of Maple Grove, Minn.-based Referral Stream (TheReferralStream.com). networkers ask for referrals. Master networkers ask for referral he says. the difference? referral can lead to a single sale. But a referral partner is someone who can send you prospective customers on a regular basis, the way a dentist sends new patients to an says Bear. How do you find referral partners for your business? According to Bear, answer these three questions: 3. What profession is your next customer going to for advice on how to find you? minnesota BUSINESS i le rk rc Jim Bear here is a two-way street. must find a way to reciprocate, or a referral partnership falls says Bear. That means, if you send business to your referral partner, find somebody who can. Example: Dr. Bob the orthodontist send new patients to Dr. Cindy the dentist. But he can set up partnerships with real estate agents (whose clients need help finding a dentist), the pediatrician (who sees babies before they have teeth), and others who can. To find referral partners, all you need is imagination 1. What profession will and effort. The know about your next the form of dependable customer before you do? new revenue streams that can sustain your business 2. What profession sells to for worth it. the same customer as you, but for a different reason? All you need are a handful of referral partnerships to fill your calendar with qualified prospects. Of course, success a or br an Business Referrals Marketing, Public Relations, Communications and Media Kevin Donlin is a marketing copywriter, author, speaker and principal of clientcloningsystems.com. January 2012 Beyond Storytelling Transform your message into a platform idea. By Steve Wehrenberg Your company probably has some kind of a core message or promise for your customers. And if like most, probably based on the art of storytelling, which means it guides what you say and not necessarily what you do. We push to develop something that goes beyond mere storytelling, what we call a platform idea. A platform idea works across multiple channels. It tells your employees how to behave and what to do, and it becomes symbolic, iconic and visceral. General Electric, for example, developed a platform idea based on an internal insight. People who worked at GE used their imaginations to come up with solutions that would profoundly change everything from the quality of health care to the quality of the air. This behavior was and still is at the heart of everything associated with the GE brand, from low-noise jet engines to energy-saving wind turbines to med tech capable of detecting the onset of Based on this internal insight, communications strategists and outside agencies created a powerful platform idea for the brand: Imagination at Work. That idea guides not only what they say in their marketing communications, but how GE employees should behave at work every day. A platform idea is more than just advertising copy or some kind of internal theme line. A powerful one, like Imagination at Work, can integrate what the company says in marketing, inspire what its workforce does and engage its customers across multiple channels. And a brilliant one, like Just Do It, can last for decades and insert a brand squarely into popular culture. Steve Wehrenberg is CEO of Campbell Mithun, an instructor in the of strategic communications graduate program and co-author of The Successful Marketing Plan.