Get Client Referrals

Episode 901: Get Client Referrals, with Bill Cates

Get client referrals as a way of growing your business. Learn from Bill Cates on achieving exponential growth when you get client referrals.

Get client referrals and more by listening to this podcast episode with our guest, Bill Cates. While trekking through the Himalayas, the Andes and the Alps; while camping in the Arctic Circle and living on a houseboat in Kashmir, India, Bill Cates built and sold two successful publishing companies. For the past 25 years, his mission has been helping professional service companies grow through referrals, introductions, and other relationship marketing strategies. Bill Cates has spoken to over 350,000 professionals worldwide and has trained over 70,000 in his system. You will gain a proven process to enhance client engagement and leverage that engagement into quality introductions that result in new clients.

What you will learn from this episode about how to get client referrals:

• Why Bill believes having satisfied clients isn’t enough to get client referrals and how reinforcing your value can grow your client base
• The importance of creating a strong, precise message to attract more people to your business, rather than casting a wide net
• What a “right fit client” is, how to spot them and how to attract them to create joy and profit for you and your business
• The neuroscience of relevance and how to apply its principles to interactions with all kinds of clients
• How marketing your company in a “compelevant” way keeps clients interested and engaged
• The most crucial emotional skills required to connect with your new clients and keep them coming back
• Balancing the use of analysis and emotional connection to cover a variety of clients across industries
• One of the keys to switching referral growth for your business from incremental to exponential
• Recognizing what Bill says is one of the biggest obstacles to growing your business
• Learn additional secrets on how to get client referrals and win those new clients

Resources:

• Websites:
  •  www.referralcoach.com
  • www.billcates.com
• Twitter: @Bill_Cates
• Facebook: Bill Cates – Referral Coach (@ReferralCoach)
• Become an expert on how to get client referrals by checking out this blog

Additional Resources:

• Sell With Authority by Drew McLellan and Stephen Woessner: https://amzn.to/39y7x13
• Predictive ROI Free Resource Library: https://predictiveroi.com/resources/
• Stephen Woessner’s LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/stephenwoessner/
• Learn how to get client referrals by cultivating relationships with people

 

 

Get Client Referrals: Full Episode Transcript

 

Get ready to find your recipe for success on how to get client referrals from America’s top business owners here at Onward Nation with your host, Stephen Woessner.

 

Good morning. I’m Stephen Woessner, CEO of Predictive ROI and your host for Onward Nation, where I interview today’s top business owners so we can learn their recipe for success, how they built and how they scaled their business. In fact, you may have been seeing this go on at Predictive ROI because we’ve been rebuilding our free resources section on predictiveroi.com.

 

I’ve been mentioning this for a while that new resources were coming and now they’re posted. They’ve been out, and I hope you’re taking advantage of that. You can download free practical and tactical guides for everything from search engine optimization to how to apply the Trojan Horse of sales strategy within your business, to how to use LinkedIn to generate leads and other success strategies that we have compiled from the brilliant insights shared by our very generous guests.

 

So just go to predictiveroi.com/resources and everything is free. Just whatever you request will send it right to your inbox. 

 

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Get Client Referrals: Bill Cates’ Introduction

 

Before we welcome today’s guest, Bill Cates, I want to share some additional context around why I was so over the moon excited that Bill said yes to my invitation. So for the past 25 years, his mission Onward Nation has been to help professional services firms, business owners just like you, how to grow their businesses through referrals, through introductions and other if you want to call them relationship marketing strategies.

 

He’s also a very high demand speaker or a speaker who’s in high demand. As you might imagine, he has spoken to over 350,000 professionals worldwide and has trained over 70,000 business owners in their teams and his system. And I love this word here because he has systematized, not aimlessly wandering through space. He has systematized everything that he has done.

 

He’s also just released a brand new book, and we’re going to chat about some of the big golden nuggets, some strategic nuggets out of his latest book Onward Nation that I think are so in the sweet spot of being helpful to you, which, again, is why I’m super excited to have this conversation in front of you on Renesmee, because not only going to be helpful to you, but but I’m excited to learn a ton from Bill, so the title of his new book is Radical Relevance.

 

And then the subtitle is Sharpening Your Value Proposition. Cut through the noise and Win More clients. This is about, you know, really narrowing your focus on that right fit client. What is the sweet spot client? What does that person look like? And then how do you cut through the noise or the clutter? How do you grab attention?

 

I mean, everybody knows that our prospects are super busy. And how do we develop a relationship? Bill has that system and that’s what we’re going to chat about today, Onward Nation. I think this is going to be extremely helpful. So without further ado, welcome to Onward Nation, Bill. 

 

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Get Client Referrals: Bill’s Path and Journey

 

Thank you, Stephen, and I’m glad you said, highly, what it was you said, the man being the speaker, that I’m not a demanding speaker and you’re in high demand.

 

High demand because there are a lot of those guys out there. You know what? The blue M&M, and green room and all that stuff that is not, you know, you’re in high demand. No, that’s exactly right. Thank you. You’re very welcome. Thanks again for saying yes to join me here, with Onward Nation. And before we dive into the, literally the litany of questions that I want to just fire your way actually take us behind the curtain here.

 

I mean, obviously, you’ve accomplished a lot over the several decades that you have been engaged in this space. And so your bio is very impressive. But it’s just a portion of your story. So, tell us more about you and your path and your journey and, and then we’ll dive in with the questions. Sure. One could call me a bit of a serial entrepreneur in the sense that I’ve had other businesses.

 

I’ve been in business for 40 years. Hopefully I don’t sound like an old fart. But I’ve been at it for a long time, and I’ve built and sold two successful book publishing companies, and I was looking for the next thing to do. And a buddy of mine said, you know, you should be a professional speaker. You’d be good at it.

 

And I go, great. What’s sad? I didn’t know anything about speaking training, but I’m an old rock and roll musician. I toured the country as a drummer in a rock and roll band years ago, and so I kind of like the entertainment side of things. I also, like many folks in Onward Nation, I’m sure are serial learners.

 

So I do love learning. And now I get to learn things and try them out in my own business and then share them with other people so they can have those moments and create results. And so it’s kind of a culmination of all the things that I’ve done up to this point is the ability to share what I’ve learned to other people with other people.

 

So, yeah, I mean, I’m devoted to my work, like a lot of folks, like a lot of business owners and like a lot of business owners. I struggle with, you know, do I own the business or. There’s a business on me? And, you know, we have, some times are better than others. I gotta tell you, though, real quick.

 

And I think your folks might appreciate this. The best year of sales we ever had was the year that I had three day weekends off almost the entire year. Wow. I don’t know whether I could take them off because we were having a good year or we had a great year because I was taking them off.

 

But, it was a great lesson for me. Well, you know, one of the things that he, you know, really stood out to me as you and I have, you know, gotten to know each other outside of the show is, you know, in all of our conversations, you’re always talking about sharing. You’re always talking about taking what you’ve learned and passing it on to others.

 

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Get Client Referrals: Generosity Is Important

 

And so there’s like this teaching component, there’s a sharing component. But all of that is wrapped up in this generosity piece. I mean, you’re so generous with sharing your expertise and the reason why I’m excited for you to be here today. But I just wonder how, like, from your perspective, how much that has really fueled your business too because, like, you do that in spades.

 

Well, I think it has. I mean, I think I have gone down past that I shouldn’t have and sharing and giving. Yeah, probably. But for the most part, isn’t that one of the ways we stand out right now? I mean, it’s in unless we don’t have any competitor in the space that we’re in. And even if we don’t have a direct competitor, we’re usually competing for limited dollars in other resources.

 

It’s how we stand out through giving. And I know that you are also very giving. In fact, I did a little research on you and I talked to some of the folks that you help put on podcasts, and everyone they said was just Steve. And we’ll go above and beyond the call of duty to make sure you’re successful.

 

And that’s, you know what? Back to my days of helping folks get more referrals and introductions. That’s how we make that happen. We create those wow moments. That’s how we attract people into our world by providing some value at the get go and not being stingy with our value. So yeah, it kind of fits who I am.

 

You’re right. I tend to be a giver, but I think it’s also helped me in business quite a bit. Well, so let’s start to shine the spotlight here on your new book. I love the title Radical Relevance. And then, you know, sharpening your value proposition. That’s so great that the first piece in the subtitle cut through the noise you and I were talking about in the pre-interview chat.

 

We’re all dealing with that clutter and being able to get into that mind space. And then win more clients. 

 

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Get Client Referrals: Deciding On the Book Title

 

So again, this is like such a sweet spot for Onward Nation business owners. Why did you decide? I mean, you can obviously name your book anything, but why did you decide on this title? Like why? Why did this really stick out for you?

 

Sure. It’s funny, it actually came from a brainstorming session with one of my study groups. And so real quick, as you mentioned, I’ve been teaching business owners how to get more referrals and introductions for over 25 years. And so when I first started with this, I would teach people how to ask for an introduction, how to ask for a referral without looking like an over aggressive life insurance agent because nobody wants to look like that.

 

And I tell that to life insurance agents when I speak to them. And what I found is a lot of these folks weren’t referable in the first place. They weren’t providing that value. They didn’t have that process that made them referable, that would generate referrals without asking, and that would create receptive folks. So we started doing a huge focus on client engagement and what that means and how to create that sense of engagement.

 

Our study actually revealed the fact there’s a low correlation between client satisfaction and giving of referrals. Satisfied clients are loyal, but only 20% gave referrals in the preceding 12 months in the study. So what we learned is we have to create engaged clients. And so I started helping businesses with that. And then of course, do not call regulations out.

 

And all the, just the ways that people hide behind the phone and you know, all this, it’s just hard to reach people. Right. So, we started working on introductions, focusing on introductions, not just the word of mouth, not just the hey, call George, use my name while George doesn’t pick up his phone and George is wondering why his friend gave his name out in the first place.

 

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Get Client Referrals: Solving Specific Client Problems

 

So we want to introduce that connection. And then, you know, I don’t know. Hey, how it is for you, Stephen, but I know for my business, when I help solve one problem, sometimes I don’t create a new problem per se, but I reveal another problem that needs to be solved. And so I was preparing for a speech, and I was interviewing a number of people that were going to be in the session.

 

And I learned that a lot of these folks didn’t have very strong value propositions. How they talked about their value was pretty trite, a lot of platitudes, pretty weak. Now, the power of the referral or the introduction would carry them through a weak value proposition. Because you’re using that borrowed trust in that relationship. And even if you don’t explain your value as well as you could, the fact that your friend recommended you and that’s enough for them sometimes.

 

Right? But that’s where I realized it was my next thing to get my teeth into, to help business owners and financial professionals of all sorts. And so what I’ve learned is that generally speaking, and there are exceptions to this, the narrower, the better, the sharper that we try to hone who we’re trying to reach and therefore our messaging becomes more effective because of that.

 

The mistake that I see so many people making is they open their net up a little bit too far and they go, well, you know, I don’t want to miss these people. And I know I’d also like to kind of do business. So we’re going to describe the business in a way that theoretically attracts more people.

 

But what it actually ends up doing is attracting fewer people because the message is weaker. It’s not as honed, it’s not as radically relevant. And so back to the study group. We’re talking about this. And I said, you know, everybody’s talking about what makes you different. And we need to talk about that. And that’s important obviously. And they’re talking about that.

 

But I see all the all the buyer cares about all the prospective client cares about really is are you right for me? Are you relevant to me? And that’s what made this word relevant. And then we started brainstorming with other ideas. And so that’s kind of how it all came about is, you know, if you’re going to talk about what makes you different, if you can talk about anything, but if it’s not relevant to your prospective client, then they won’t even listen.

 

They’ll ignore you. And so to stand out, we have to be very sharp, almost quite radical with how we talk about our value. Well, and if you’ve been, you know, and I think this is the point here that you’re driving home and if we’ve been bold enough to go narrow, because I think you’re really picking on a nerve here, which I’m glad that you’re doing because back in episode 864 and one of my solo cars, I talked about going niche. The more niche you go, the better. 

 

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Get Client Referrals: Narrowing Down Your Target Market

 

So let’s talk about this a little bit further. Let’s take this piece a little bit more narrow. Because I think you’re really on to something. The more narrow you go, the better. And that does make you more relevant because you’ve gone narrow. Right. All right, first of all, I got to ask you, how do you know what number episode, 864.

 

I mean, you have, like, all listed next to your computer screen. Are you just making that number up? I don’t know, it is actually 864 and yes, I do have them right in front of me. So, when you were saying that, I’m like, oh, well, one there’s I think you and I are on the same page of this whole narrow piece.

 

So I’m like, oh, wait a minute, what was the number? And so then I can quickly go through the list. So I love it. So, the book has kind of laid out, without belaboring the point, the first thing we want to focus on is what I’ll call the target. And the target is this kind of the, some of the big strategic decisions we need to make?

 

And again, so is the target market and it could be the target industry. It could be, you know, if you’re a financial professional, it could be people working for a large company. If you’re doing B2B, which most of the folks listening here are, you know, it’s usually an industry. And you can go very narrow within an industry depending on the size of the industry.

 

Now, before we go any further, the reason why most people won’t do this, even though they’ve heard it a thousand times, is out of fear. The fear is if I just focus on this group or this segment of the industry, then I’m going to miss all this other opportunity. And the truth is, yes, you may not take advantage of some of that opportunity out there, but you’ll be so successful in your niche you won’t even notice it.

 

And so it’s really, a scarcity thinking, to feel that you can’t target, you know, obviously the larger the market, the larger the country you live in. All of that has a factor in this. But if we want to be able to attract someone’s attention, if we want to be relevant, so they’ll actually just pay attention to us in the first place, then we have to speak their language.

 

And how do we learn their language? How do we find out what their problems really are? How do we create an expertise that is not just wide but goes deep? Well, it’s through targeting a niche and marketing a very specific market. And I’ve always done that in my business. And I have to like a lot of folks, resist myself from opening the message up a little bit, opening the market up a little bit to try to cast a wider net.

 

Now, can you have more than one target market? More than one niche? Yeah, absolutely. You can and I see it happen in a lot of different ways. I don’t usually recommend trying to, you know, build 2 or 3 at the same time. Let’s get good at one before we bring another one. And usually the other one is related to the first one.

 

It’s just, you know, it’s an ancillary industry, if you will. But I’ve seen companies I’ve worked with, where if there’s a sales force, then the sales force, each one of those people may pick a vertical market to target. So the company as a whole may be a little generic, but each individual within that company is focusing on a niche.

 

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Get Client Referrals: Showing Clients You’re Empathetic About Them

 

I’m working with a CPA firm right now where they had a few vertical markets that they were going after. One CPA was working on nonprofits and another was working on medical practices and another was working on real estate developers. So they had it, but it wasn’t really formalized. It was kind of loosey goosey. And so one of the things that I helped them with is actually creating these very specific marketing channels.

 

And they’re not siloed off from the rest of the firm. So everybody knows about them, and they can create a lot of internal referrals for each other. But it’s amazing how it’s helped them define their messaging when they go to market and bring more value to that industry, because they know that industry, that vertical market better, and they talk their language.

 

One of the biggest things. And then I’ll shut up. You can ask me the question, but one of the biggest things that we need to do in our marketing, what our clients or prospective clients need from us is empathy. And what I mean by that is they, after they talk to us or read something we’ve written, we want them to say, oh, she gets me.

 

She understands me, right? He understands my world. He must have been sitting as a fly on the wall in our last, you know, strategy session or whatever. That’s what we need to be able to convey. And it’s hard to do that in a generic way. But when we target a specific industry and the deeper we get, then the easier it is to do that and convey that.

 

And that’s how we pull people into our world, by them feeling that we get them and we know them, perhaps even better than some folks that are serving them now. So we start with a target, and then we get to the bullseye, which we can talk about as well. But I want to shut up. Quick questions or remarks you have.

 

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Get Client Referrals: Definition of a Right-Fit Client

 

Well, this is such a great path that you’re taking us down, in fact. So let me take that piece and loopback to something you shared with me during our pre-interview chat, because I think that I’m thinking that these are connected here. Like you mentioned a couple of terms during our pre-interview in the green room.

 

You said, right fit client. Actually, Stephen, it’s like a business soulmate. So, connect these here like how do you define the right fit client. How do you define a business soulmate as it kind of relates to the target. Sure. So that’s the bullseye right. So the target is the industry perhaps. And there may be ways to get narrower within a specific industry ultimately to the right fit client.

 

The bullseye and so what I mean by a right fit client is, is someone who you were meant to serve and they were meant to be served by you. And we all have those people. We all have, you know, stumbled across or somehow created those folks in our business. And so to then be able to figure out what are the the characteristics of those people, you know, when you’re serving your right fit clients, it’s easier, it’s more profitable, and there’s more joy in your work, because there are people that appreciate you for what you do, and you appreciate them for appreciate you, and you like the work that you’re doing with them, etc. 

 

So that’s what we’re looking for. And we want to replicate those obviously, and to replicate those, it always helps to get very clear on who they are. And there’s a term in marketing called persona. You’ve probably used that over the years of your episodes. And that’s to get to the point where you really do know the demographic, the psychographic aspects of these people that you’re trying to reach and what happens is, as you slowly fine tune your messaging to attract right fit clients, what will happen is you will indeed attract the right fit and you will repel all the wrong fit.

 

Yeah. And you know, I don’t mean to use the word repel in a negative way, but that’s good when that happens, right? For business, it absolutely is. And how many of us take on clients that don’t really fit our business? Totally either. They’re either out of a sense of obligation to a referral source, or a sense of lack of abundance thinking, or for whatever reason, we take on wrong fit clients and nobody wins from that scenario.

 

Yeah. Hey, look, early in your business getting started, all right? It’s fine. They’re breathing. You’ll talk to them, okay? But eventually you get to a point where you have this abundance mentality, and then everything is designed. 

 

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Get Client Referrals: Remain Relevant to Your Ideal Clients

 

So the last part of the subtitle of the book is when more ideal clients now use the word ideal in the subtitle, because the idea of right fit, people don’t necessarily know what that means.

 

They can guess what it means. And this is a principle of marketing I thought I’d throw in here. So one of the things we’ve learned, there’s a whole chapter in the book on the neuroscience of relevance. And I’ve learned about how the brain works and how it applies this subject matter. And so real quick to the brain, its main job is keeping the organism alive.

 

Okay. That’s what the brain is, has to do. And so therefore it’s looking for danger and it’s looking for, you know, opportunity and it’s conserving calories. The brain wants to conserve calories. And that’s in because that’s energy. And so when you communicate a concept to a prospective client that they don’t understand, the brain has to work too hard to figure it out.

 

Guess what? It’s less relevant. They won’t pay attention to it. Generally speaking you lose them. So you always want to start with something that’s familiar to them. Using words, using ideas, concepts that are familiar. And then as you bring them into your world, you can start to introduce other phrases and words and concepts. But first you have to make the brain feel at ease and comfortable.

 

So that’s why on the subtitle, I use ideal clients. And then in the book I can describe this concept of a right fit client. There’s another term in the book. That I do the same thing. So in the book we talk about radical relevance, strategic relevance, tactical relevance, how we get our message out to attract the right people.

 

But that’s not the end game. We attract them, but then we have to move them along right in our process. We have to remain relevant. We also have to be compelling so they’ll keep moving in the decision process. So their interest is maintained and eventually takes the right action, hopefully to work with us. If it’s the right fit.

 

So I liken it to an alternating current. It’s got to be like relevant, compelling, relevant, compelling, relevant, compelling, constant throughout. Right. So the word I’ve developed is relevant. We need our value proposition to be always relevant and always compelling to the receiver to be compelling, urgent. Now, I can’t. I couldn’t title the book Competitive and Value Propositions because nobody knows what that means.

 

It makes the brain work too hard, but it’s a concept I can introduce through into the book as I can explain it. And then people get I’ve had clients they’re hosting compelling and value proposition workshops in their company. They love the word, they love the concept. But I had to explain it first before they got it. 

 

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Get Client Referrals: Emotion Plays a Big Part in the Decision-Making Process

 

Okay, so this is this is there are some really, really big nuggets there.

 

One I like, I had no idea from a caloric spend perspective. Had no idea that essentially the brain has filters like not too hard to take to make out like I did not know that. That is awesome. So thank you for sharing that with us. And then let me give the compel event piece back to you to make sure I’m tracking with you.

 

So that’s the piece. Like when you do that. Well not only is it compellingly irrelevant, but that’s what moves somebody. You use the AC current. We’re alternating current metaphors. I think that’s what’s moving somebody down the Decision-Making path. That journey and my tracking with you. Exactly. Yeah. Right. And so we have to remain relevant. Otherwise we lose interest.

 

And if we’re not compelling, right, then they forget about us. You know, they ignore us as well. So, what creates that is emotion. And, you know, a lot of people talk about how emotion is the biggest part of the decision making process. Why did I decide, you know, is this really true? And I dug in and Antonio Damasio was one of the, the same neurosciences in this area of emotion.

 

And he’s done a number of studies. But one of those studies he found is that the part of the brain that had subjects for the part of the brain that could feel emotion was damaged, and these people could not make decisions. No ability to feel emotion, no ability to make a decision. They couldn’t even decide if they’re going to eat flakes or corn flakes for breakfast the next morning.

 

Wow. Yeah. They live their life off of checklists. The checklist makes the decision for them. Tough state to be in. Luckily, there aren’t that many people like that. But the bottom line here is that it’s emotion that creates this, that the action in a relationship. And it’s not to say that the prefrontal cortex in the processing of information isn’t important.

 

Of course it is. But at the heart of every decision is emotion. Do I trust this decision? Does it feel safe? Does it feel right? You know, you work with, you go in and you make a presentation to a committee to hire you for your services, and you leave. And what’s the first thing someone says? I like her.

 

Yeah, I really like what she had to say. You know, I mean, it’s just an emotional reaction. And, of course, they want to look and make sure the numbers are right and all that. So there’s a lot of things that will come that creates this emotion, a couple real quick ones is clarity.

 

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Get Client Referrals: Bringing Value Will Urge Clients to Move Forward

 

The more you can help someone get clear on where they are in their life, in their business, whatever it is, then the more value you can bring to them and that allows them to move forward. A confused mind will not take action. So clarity is a big one. Urgency having a sense of time frame, right? There’s a reason why sports, except for maybe baseball and cricket, have a clock, right?

 

It creates that sense of urgency. And there’s a benefit to acting now, and there’s a cost to not acting now. And so having that kind of conversation with prospective clients and clients and existing clients, right. Because if you have an ongoing relationship with a client, you’ll run into these things all the time. It’s not a not just in the courtship of bringing them on, into your world.

 

So those are a couple. The other one is a big one that most people know about social proof. And there’s a lot of ways to create that sense of social proof. But the brain and the human being in general looks to be part of a community. It’s part of the survival mechanism. It’s part of the mating mechanism.

 

Yeah. There’s a lot to the sense of community. And so that’s why social proof is so powerful in the sales and marketing process. So that’s just that’s a little bit on the compelling side, which is also in the book of how to. Because if you just attract someone but you don’t compel them to move forward, then what’s the point?

 

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Get Client Referrals: Using The Right Statistics Will Create an Emotional Response

 

But this is a great recipe here because you really sliced apart the emotionality of the decision making process. Or let me rephrase, that showed how the decision making process is grounded in emotion. Maybe that’s a better way to say it. And in talking about clarity, urgency, social proof, that is awesome. And the reason why I love what you just shared there is because I think you, you really just forcefully in a very professional way, of course, but dispelled the myth of no, we need to have logic.

 

We need to have, you know, rational thought in this decision making process. We need to overwhelm the prospective client with facts and figures and charts and tables and all of that. And yes, Onward Nation. There is a place in the presentation for that. Yeah. Absolutely. Right. And maybe that’s part of the social proof in that kind of stuff.

 

But if we ignore the emotion that 100% of decisions are emotion, we’re going to completely miss it. Right. And then there’s going to be incongruence. Right. We’re going to leave the presentation thinking, oh we just crushed it. And then the prospect’s thinking, boy they don’t get us at all. Right. Exactly. And empathy is an emotion.

 

And when we display that and they feel that trust is an emotion. Yeah. And there’s no question about that. And so think of it this way, a statistic, right. That’s a fact, a statistic can actually create an emotional response. You know, 80% of today’s baby boomers are totally ill prepared for retirement. Oh, I wonder if I’m one of them.

 

You know what I mean? It. So any kind of statistic, especially the right to test statistics, makes it easy for me to say, used in the right place can actually create that emotional response. And now, you know, when you’re working with folks that tend to be on the analytical side of things. 

 

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Get Client Referrals: Giving Clients a Step-By-Step Path

 

So, for instance, I’m working with a CPA firm. I can’t just relate to them on the emotional level of what they’re trying to accomplish. They have to see a path. I have to give them a step by step path. Their brains are, I guess, wired that way to see that they have to have evidence of the fact I’ve done this for other people. But all of that triggers an emotional response.

 

Of course, having the evidence of a path that will work makes them trust. Okay, that’s the social proof part, right? Yeah. Make them exact. Well, that’s part of it. Yeah. It makes them feel more. So the evidence could be social proof. But just if I say, look, here’s how we’re going to get there. All right. Well, how are we going to get well?

 

All right. Step one is this step two is this step three. Is it? Oh okay I see right. That’s logic. But guess what. Now they feel clear. Now they feel comfortable. Now they’re more likely to actually take action. So they run together at all times. Really super smart. Thank you for adding that additional context on top of that recipe because that was really, really good.

 

So I know that we’re quickly running out of time, and I feel like there’s so much more that we need to cover. So I hope that you will accept my encore invitation at some point, because it’s just going to be a pleasure to have you back to take this even deeper. But I want to be respectful of your schedule today.

 

But before we go, before we close out and say goodbye, and any final advice that you like to share? Anything you think we might have missed, Bill? And then? And then please do tell Onward Nation business owners the best way to connect with you. 

 

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Get Client Referrals: Final Advice from Bill

 

There’s so much we can do. I think I’ll get a little more esoteric now, and  a lesson I learned from a mentor. One of my mentors a long time ago, Bill Wilks, grew up in the neighborhood, friends of my family. To me, he was the ogre of the neighborhood. But, there’s two things he taught me. The first thing he taught me was about this idea of referrals and multiplying your best clients.

 

And what I learned from them is that serving the heck out of your clients or customers will create some referrals and introductions, and that’s good. That’s important. But only create incremental growth. If you want to create exponential growth, then you have to have some processes in place to actually make more of those referrals. Introductions happen. There has to be proactivity and systems in place to make it happen.

 

That’s one thing I want to leave folks with. And the other thing that Mr. Burks taught me was the incredible power of belief and what he meant by this. He said, Billy, that’s what a kid they called me when I was younger to Billy Cates, if you ever hit a point in your life, business, personal where you get stuck, where you hit a plateau, something’s not working.

 

Says, don’t go to tactics. Don’t even go to strategies. Most people just run the tactics, he says. Look at your beliefs. What do you believe about yourself, about your business, about your clients, about your prospects, about the industry? What do you believe that may be limiting you? And that’s the first place you have to look because if you’ve got limiting beliefs in place, all the tactics and strategies in the world, you know, yeah, might make a little difference, but not the difference you are really looking for that is awesome.

 

Great mentorship lesson. And then obviously you still remember it today. And more importantly you’re still applying it today. I try every day, every time I get stuck, I go, all right, Bill, what do you want? You know, what’s my limiting belief here? And sometimes we don’t know what it is. And that’s why I have a couple of study groups and, you know, it’s hard to see the picture when you’re in the frame.

 

So sometimes our blind spots are scattered. Most need to be pointed out by other people. Amen. We can’t always figure it out ourselves. 

 

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Get Client Referrals: How to Connect with Bill

 

What’s the best way for us and business owners to connect with you, Bill? Sure. referralcoach.com is our main website referralcoach.com or Bill Cates and that’s with a C by the way it’s Bill Cates not Bill Gates.

 

I know Stephen balked at first. He goes, why is Bill Cates reaching out to me? And it’s with the C I missed it by one letter, but, billcates.com. And I’m very responsive. Shoot me an email. Happy to chat with you about your business. Happy to help any way I possibly can, even if there’s no money involved.

 

Just love to give. Love to help on how to get client referrals. Okay. Onward Nation, no matter how many notes you took or how often you go back and re-listen to the generous insights and wisdom, the strategy, the tactics, all of it, that Bill was generously shared with you. The key is that you have to take it and take action upon it. You have to take it and apply it.

 

And Bill, we have the same 86,400 seconds in a day. We all have that same sort of clock, if you will. And yet you took your time to generously come on to the show, to be our mentor and guide to help Onward Nation business owners move onward to that next level. Thank you so much, my friend Stephen. You ask and I jump so happily to do it.

 

This episode is complete, so head over to OnwardNation.com for show notes and more food to fuel your ambition. Continue to find your recipe for success here at Onward Nation.

 

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