I had a meeting today with a very impressive young man who is right at the beginning of his journey into self-employment. We’d met before, although only briefly at a networking event, and he’d also been following some of my Notebook posts online, so it was nice to finally have the opportunity to sit down and have a proper conversation.

We talked about his new business, what he does and where he’d like to take it. He’s clearly enthusiastic about what he’s building, and it was refreshing to hear someone at the beginning of their business journey talking so positively about the future.

At some point our conversation moved on to networking. He’s recently joined a well-known referral networking group and is only just beginning to understand the concept of referral marketing. That’s something I have a little bit of experience with, having been involved in business networking for around 14 years.

So we started throwing some ideas around. Who is his ideal customer? Who already works with those people? Which types of businesses or professionals could become useful referral sources? Who should he be arranging one-to-one meetings with? And perhaps most importantly, what can he do to help the other people in his network?

We talked about his ideal target market and started identifying the types of people who might naturally come across the customers he wants to work with. One thought led to another, and before we knew it we’d pretty much started creating a strategy for how he could get more from his networking membership.

That’s one of the things I think people sometimes misunderstand about referral marketing. It’s not simply about joining a networking group and waiting for everyone in the room to start sending customers your way.

For me, good referral marketing is about developing relationships with people who understand what you do, the type of customer you’re looking for and, importantly, why they should feel comfortable introducing you to someone they know.

Finding the right referral partners or referral sources can be incredibly valuable. If you’re a solicitor, accountant, mortgage adviser, HR consultant or web designer, for example, there are likely to be other professionals working with very similar types of clients without competing directly with you.

But identifying those people is only the beginning.

You still have to build the relationship.

That was actually one of the things I found myself thinking about after today’s meeting. We’d packed a huge amount into an hour and I’d learned a lot about what this young man does and the business he’s building. But I hadn’t learned very much about him, and that’s an important part of referral marketing. If you’re developing a relationship with someone who you hope may eventually introduce you to their clients, contacts or friends, they need to know more than what services you provide. They need to understand the person behind the business.

What are you like to work with? Why did you start the business? What matters to you? What sort of customers do you enjoy working with? What are you trying to achieve? What do you do outside work?

Those conversations might not immediately feel like business development, but I think they’re incredibly important. When somebody refers another person to you, they’re effectively putting a little bit of their own reputation on the line. They’re saying, “I know this person, I trust them and I think you should talk to them.”

You don’t normally reach that point after exchanging business cards at one networking meeting, It takes time. Today’s meeting reminded me how much I enjoy these types of conversations. It started as a normal business meeting, but at times it felt much more like one of my mentoring sessions. We talked through ideas, asked questions, challenged a few thoughts and explored different possibilities. There wasn’t a presentation or a formal agenda. It was simply two people talking about business and seeing where the conversation took us.

And I got something from it too.

I learned about a business and an industry that I didn’t know much about before. It made me think again about some of my own experiences of networking and referral marketing, and it reminded me that you can sometimes get more from an hour-long conversation than you can from hours sitting behind a desk.

We’ve agreed that we should work together in the future, and I’m genuinely looking forward to seeing how his business develops.

He’s at the beginning of his journey, and there will undoubtedly be plenty to learn along the way. But he’s already doing something that I think is incredibly important for any new business owner. He’s getting out there, meeting people, asking questions and building relationships. I still think that’s one of the most valuable things you can do, because good referral marketing isn’t really about collecting as many contacts as possible, It’s about developing relationships with people who understand you, trust you and know exactly when to say:

“I know someone you should speak to.”

And getting to that point takes more than one meeting.

Glenn’s Notebook – Business, life and everything in between.