The best referral-generating practices of ultra-successful professionals combined with the most effective networking methodologies of self-made millionaires results in an exceptionally efficacious framework for cultivating centers of influence—something referred to as street-smart networking. This equation summarizes the approach:
Aspirations + Agenda + Assessments + Alignment = Advocates/Achievements
Set High Aspirations
Street-smart networking starts with your aspirations. When the focus is on cultivating centers of influence, you need to be as specific as possible about the numbers. Examples of these numbers include how many centers of influence, providing how many new affluent clients, generating what kind of revenues.
Advance Your Agenda
With many of your goals in place, you need to think through what you have to do and prepare. In effect, you need to put together a plan. Desiring a larger and wealthier affluent clientele, and sourcing them from centers of influence, you must delineate the activities that will enable you to achieve these goals.
Conduct Assessments
In-depth evaluations of centers of influence are foundations to the framework. It’s essential to move past presumptions and truly understand the motivations and limitations, the opportunities and obstacles for each potential center of influence.
Ensure Alignment
When you know what they’re striving to accomplish and have identified the centers of influence who can prove helpful, there’s the need for alignment. The parties need to be tied by mutual motivations. Moreover, these connections must be structured in a way that is rewarding to everyone involved. Direct and indirect financial incentives prove to be the best at cementing relationships with centers of influence. In many cases, this is a function of paying them for their support.
Convert Centers Of Influence Turned Advocates
By carefully selecting centers of influence and incentivizing them, you transform a center of influence into an advocate. This professional is now highly motivated to find affluent clients in need of your expertise. Moreover, you’re the professional they’re making referrals to.
Measure Achievements
The results you realize from working with advocates are ongoing—constantly evaluated against your agenda. The achievements are consistently being critiqued. These critical appraisals enable you to perpetually refine and enhance your network of centers of influencers. This might entail anything from tweaking the mechanisms of alignment to changing the centers of influence you’re working with.
If your objective is to create a flood of new affluent clients, then becoming a street-smart networker is the answer.
