How To Manage Your Network Of Referrals

Increasing your client base in practice partly depends on how well you can manage your network of referrals. An easy (and free) way to do this is to organize all your contacts and their information into an excel sheet. This is to help you keep track so you don’t miss out anyone.

The Microsoft excel application has a feature called fields or cells that allows you to capture important information about your prospective client such name, email, phone no, address, occupation, family and personal interests information, special dates and also a narrative field to record the main topics of each conversation.

You can integrate this with your calendar system, which can attach a follow up reminder for you. You will also need to categorize your contacts into 3:

• High potential
• Moderate potential and
• Low potential.

This helps you prioritize the amount of time and investment used to develop the relationship, as well as guide your referral development strategy.

High-potential referrers are clients and colleagues who have direct experience with your work, and who trust and respect you as a legal practitioner.

Moderate-potential referrers include other professionals such as bankers, accountants, consultants etc. who have not use your services but are respected and have knowledge of your reputation. A referral or endorsement from these type of persons is fueled by the weight of their own reputation.

Low-potential referrers are all those others that you captured in mapping your referral network, but who do not rise to the moderate level. This last group is still important, as they may know someone who needs your service.

Armed with this, I urge you to categorize your present contact base like this and I can’t wait to hear how it worked or didn’t work for you. Remember, you will only know what works and what doesn’t when you implement.