There are many ways to go about cultivating centers of influence, and all of them do indeed work to some degree or another. The real issue is the effectiveness of the approaches you’re using and whether you can become even a little bit more successful.
Professionals employ various approaches for winning over centers of influence:
• Highlighting and promoting their expertise.
• Staying “in front” of centers of influence by regularly contacting centers of influence in a palatable manner.
• Promoting new ideas, strategies, or products to educate centers of influence on their latest and greatest client deliverables.
• Generating revenues for professional centers of influence by becoming their clients, thus receiving their affluent clients.
• Trading affluent clients.
• Connecting them with other professionals and business people. Since many professionals cannot generate meaningful revenues for the centers of influence they seek to cultivate, they hope that by introducing them to other professionals, the centers of influence will find opportunities to provide them with services.
Many professionals use a combination of these and other approaches. Each of these approaches can result in centers of influence introducing you to affluent clients, generally on a very restricted, erratic and a not-so-preferential basis. More often than not, the results are sporadic, and the quality of the affluent clients is many times questionable.
Almost universally, what centers of influence want aside from your being able to deliver exceptional results tot heir affluent clients (a given), is your ability to add value to their practice. They’re motivated, as you probably are, to create more revenues that turn into profits.
What you need to do is evaluate the opportunities to work with different centers of influence and provide the appropriate value-added component. There are a number of frameworks that will enable you to develop a deep understanding of particular centers of influence and facilitate their success. All these frameworks go meaningfully beyond the approaches noted above.
