Marketing With A $0 Budget With Referral Groups Part 5

January 27, 2010

Referral groups can also help brokers and brokerage owners.  Let’s say there are 8 neighborhoods in your region and you have at least one person in your office regularly working and living in each of those neighborhoods.  You could assign the most capable people in your office to start their own referral group in their neighborhood.  There can be some great synergy to this.  When each of these professionals does their 30-45 minute presentation at the meeting, they would make it very clear that they only work that particular neighborhood, but if any of the people there knows of people buying or selling soon in any of the other 7 neighborhoods the office covers, they should contact them and they will pass the referral on to the appropriate person.  If that person does business with this referred person then they would have to pay a referral fee to the rep who gave them the referral.

It might even be wise to force the rep to give 10%-20% of the referral fee to the person in the group who gave the referral.  If each group had 20 members within 6 months, that’d mean each of your 8 reps would have 152 eyes and ears actively looking for referrals for them (19 members x 8 clubs = 152) every day.  If each group had 40 members within a year that’d mean there’d be 304 motivated people actively looking for leads for your people.  If that wouldn’t deliver tangible results for spending 1 hour per week having lunch with other local people AND making money for you and your brokerage with the meeting fees, I don’t know what would!

You can seek out people for your group based on what type of neighborhood your farm area is.  For instance, let’s say your neighborhood is largely luxury $1 million+ homes.  You’d definitely want to get local business owners and executives in your group.  One way of doing that is by starting a club based upon a certain industry or type of business. For instance, in Toronto BNI has a chapter called the Corporate Connections chapter.  It’s a chapter strictly for people who sell Business To Business (B2B) products or services.  You could also start a club based on company role.  For instance, it could be a group strictly for C level executives or business owners in your area.

Filed under: Networking Tips,Using Email For Attracting Buyers/Sellers

Tags: BNI, email inquiries, email newsletter, email prospects, email subject line, email training tips, network, networking, networking event, referral group