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4 Ways To Get Leads From Business Networking
By Lee Duncan
There's a great method of winning more that's easily within your reach - expand your personal circle of influence.


Your circle of influence is all the people you know. If you were to sit down and write a list of all the people you know and could call or contact, that list would probably be well over 100 people. In fact, it's worth doing this as an exercise. If you give yourself an hour - timed - and don't stop until the hour is over, you'll easily write a great list of people you know who would be within your circle of influence.

If each of these knows 100 people too, that's 100 x 100, or 10,000 contacts, that you have the potential to reach via your circle of influence. In fact, this same idea is at the heart of the idea of Six Degrees Of Separation, the theory that most people are only 6 steps away from anybody in the world. For example, I can "hop" to the musician Sting via 5 connections - I've never met him personally, but my wife has a friend who was the baby-sitter for a friend of Phil Collins. And Phil Collins has played music with Sting on several occasions.
That gives us the following hops...

Hop 1 - to my wife
Hop 2 - my wife to her baby-sitter friend
Hop 3 - the baby-sitter to the friend of Phil Collins
Hop 4 - the friend of Phil Collins to Phil Collins himself
Hop 5 - Phil Collins to Sting

It's actually pretty powerful - once you connect to a celebrity, the connections jump far more quickly. Look up the six degrees of separation in Google and you'll be surprised how much you find.

However, the point of all this is to work the connections to help your business. So how can you get your friends, customers and contacts to refer to you? Here are four simple but powerful methods that you can put into practice immediately

to leverage your network and all of their contacts for more business...

1 - Become a regular at a local networking meeting. Because the purpose of these meetings is to generate for each other, you will get leads this way, especially if you are a consistent attender over time, do a good job for people and therefore become a trusted part of the community.

2 - Use a "Circle Of Influence" referral system and hold meetings with your contacts with the single explicit purpose of getting more leads for your business. I have one that uses a brainstorming method to get people willingly giving you a list of 5-10 names, and then even phoning them up to introduce you to them. It's awesome! My clients use this scheme as part of their overall tactical marketing plan and usually generates a bunch of great leads for them.

3 - Create a referral offer to reward people who refer their friends. It can a smart idea to share the reward between the referrer and the new client, because friends often don't like to make a profit from referrals.

4 - Have a referral scheme with other businesses to encourage cross referrals - for example a "bounty" payment when you win a new customer from a lead that's come from another business. That way, everybody wins.

Of course, none of these ideas works unless you do something with it! Turn one or more of these concepts into a systematized approach in your business, use the system consistently, and enjoy regular referral leads.

Of course, you may read this and think, "what a good idea". That's all it us until you do something with it. Action transforms concepts and ideas into results. Make a commitment to do something different today - get somebody to hold you accountable (even a coach!) and go find yourself some more business.
A simple way to grow your business is to engage in business coaching with Lee Duncan. You can have a psychological profile to find your own limitations and strengths as a leader and entrepreneur, and discover the many ways to grow your business that most people have never considered. Lee us a Cambridge business coach who works with companies throughout the UK for business development.

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