Referral Business Building

The other day Ryan and I gave a short presentation to a group of commercial real estate brokers at TRI Commercial in Sacramento. There were 20 commercial real estate brokers in the room. If you are in the Central Valley of California and need a real estate broker, I would highly recommend this group. They work together as a team, they ask the right questions and they are motivated to meet their client expectations. The presentation went well, and I think that both they and us learned quite a bit about each others’ businesses. I thought it was an interesting presentation because it help me reinforce a recent assessment about how business grow.

No longer can you make a few cold calls and get a contract for a new project. The information age has changed all that. Clients are now well-armed with enough information to make a decision as to if you have the knowledge and capabilities to inform them and help them achieve their goals. In addition to that, clients want their vendors to be a part of the project. Clients want their vendors to be a part of a team that has the common goal of accomplishing the project. I had heard about these concepts in a set of tapes on “Word of Mouth” marketing. My company is just starting to understand these ideas, and trying to break out of that mold of being a stolid engineering consulting firm. If you want to learn more you can go to the word of mouth marketing association website, or go to the guy whose cd’s I found to be fascinating – George Silverman. If you are not familiar, and you have been stuck in the old model of marketing and business development, you will find there is a new way to better serve your clients, and George can point you there. At my company we prefer to use the terminology Referral Business Building, but that is just us.