Second-Degree Signals: Equipping Your Referral Partners

In my weekly wanderings I find myself in the car with some frequency. I took all that time and used it to listen to audiobooks on business, marketing, time management, execution, profit … you name it. Recently I asked AI to create a history curriculum for me based on various criteria. And the book I finished a few weeks back is called Sapiens. It covers many other things, not the least of which being that the world used to be populated by mega-fauna … the likes of which we were never told about in school …

We all heard of the wooly mammoth. The sabretooth tiger.

But have you heard of the giant ground sloth? Those babies were around 15 feet tall and wandered around North America. Someone told me a class from Santa Cruz found a skeleton of one out in the mountains near here.

What about rats the size of bears?

Or in Australia there were massive marsupial wombats that were over 10 feet long, stood around 5 feet tall, and looked like a hairy dog, cat, and lizard hybrid. There were huge kangaroos weighing in at 450 pounds. And birds that stood 10 feet tall weighing 1,100 pounds.

Did you know about these things?

15-foot-tall ground sloths?

15 feet tall!

I don’t know whose job it was to decide which animals to tell kids about and which ones to leave out, but a 15-foot-tall sloth seems like a keeper to me.

Either way … I was living in the dark until I read this book. A book that isn’t even about this. The mega-fauna was a throwaway comment about the early days of Homo sapiens.

So many of us spend much of our time networking. To build relationships. To contribute to each other’s businesses. And the most effective way to do that is to add value, to educate and inform. To equip our fellow bosom buddies with everything they need to effectively support us.

And if all we do is stand in the room, give our 30-second spiel talking about how we help successful attorneys, financial advisors, and accountants … how we help people take smart, safe, and strategic actions … or guide them to gastrointestinal and athletic freedom … we are only telling them about the wooly mammoths and the sabretooth tigers and leaving out really interesting, and possibly the most useful, parts.

My days are filled with one-on-ones, coffee chats, networking groups, and social events. I’m always in front of someone new. And I’m never going to ask them if they’re in the market for a new home, if their parents need in-home care, or if they have their estate in order. Nobody is freely explaining the intricacies of their construction defects or talking to me about how their lives would be better if only someone would help them stretch.

And yet … I would very much like to send business to each and every one of the people in my network. To you!

Here’s what I need, what we all need, to do that.

We need to understand the next degree of separation. We need to know what people experience in their lives, what situations they find themselves in, what topics they might actually openly share with others … that tells us that they need you.

We need to know that when someone says their kids got their first job, or graduated from college … that this is a really good time for them to start thinking about their finances and planning for the future … so offering to introduce them to your friendly neighborhood financial advisor might be in order.

Or perhaps it means that they’re thinking about whether their kid should be renting, or whether they should help them buy their first condo … and an introduction to your group’s realtor and mortgage broker would be just what they need.

Or maybe this is an indicator that it’s time they update their estate plan.

People getting married, people having babies, people retiring … all of those are situations where an estate planning attorney might be a good introduction to offer.

People might not be talking about how they’re about to buy or sell a home … but they are absolutely telling everyone that they’re about to retire, or that they need to support their parents more often and more actively.

What second-degree signals, not first-degree asks should we be listening for? What situations or life events should the rest of us be connecting to you and your business?

When you have your one-on-ones … start sharing these situations with your colleagues and see what lights turn on. Maybe they’ll be today’s lucky 10,000 and you’ll be informing them about the 15-foot sloth.