Thomas Coles
speaker
43 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2024
last heard May 2024
Thomas Coles’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsNo recordings in the last 12 months.Older appearances are listed below; set an alert to hear about the next one.
Appearances
It's a difficult question to answer. My experience is that far too many businesses are, and far too many individuals in businesses, are embarrassed of asking for referrals, which is why I talk about that mindset shift needing to say, look, I run my business on referrals, therefore it stops being embarrassing and starts becoming just an absolutely routine thing. It needs to become a habit.
People have to get into the Whereas quite often you hear of people who think they do need to be asking for referrals realising too late. Five minutes after they left the meeting rather than during the meeting.
I think your point around the difference between personal life and professional life is largely that you would only ever ask a friend when you're looking for a new supplier of something, and therefore you've got a trusted relationship with them, trusting relationship with them.
Whereas in professional life, not every individual working in an organization is going to say that they trust the people in their client or vice versa. That's the bit that you need to overcome, the mindset that you need to overcome.
As long as you have a professional and some level of trust and relationship, then you can be asking many people that you come across and should be asking many people that you come across whether they can make, in effect, recommendations for you, but therefore give you a referral.
I characterize it slightly differently than that, Jonny, and I completely appreciate the point you're making about the equation. When I use the word trust, I mean perhaps respect. Is there sufficient respect in the relationship, in a professional relationship between two people who don't work for the same company, that they are therefore willing to help each other out?
So maybe that's a better way of putting it than trust.
Good point. So I was thinking as you were talking through that, Jolly, that maybe I was using respect as a synonym for credibility. In order to have credibility, there must be respect, and you can't get respect without seeing some credibility demonstrated.
Yeah, a conference is probably a situation, if you're a speaker on stage at a conference, probably a situation where many people listening would feel deeply uncomfortable anyway. I push them even further. I would say that the best thing you can do when you are given the opportunity of speaking to an audience on stage is to ask for a referral whilst you're up there.
You probably have to gamify it in order to get several referrals. There's probably got to be some sort of reward for one or more of the people who come back to you. But where I've persuaded clients to do it, they've had amazing success. It requires real guts. So Thomas, how does that work in practice?
I would say if you're on stage, people are probably listening to you unless you've been really tedious up to that point in the speech. Therefore, you probably need to use humour in order to just use humour to sort of defend yourself.
Rather than saying, I run my business on referrals when you're on stage, more likely make a joke of the fact, I thought I'd take the opportunity whilst you're all listening to me. Do it as simple as that. Tone of voice, bit of humour, then go in with a question. I would like to be introduced to anyone you know who does this.
I'm going to be slightly facetious, I suspect, in replying to that question, Matt. Every conversation you have is a potential opportunity to ask for a referral.
let me give you another example where people might feel uncomfortable when you're at a conference or event there are loads of people at that event who you've never met before therefore by definition you do not have that trusting respectful relationship with you don't have any credibility but even in those circumstances you can ask strangers for a referral and you will get a remarkably high hit rate just in the sense of receiving the right names the right sorts of names from those strangers
Because, in many cases, those people who you've never met before are just grateful for having a conversation with you. They're in a room full of strangers too, and therefore human nature is that they will be grateful to you for initiating a conversation, and therefore they'll try to help you.
I would say you have to go to those sorts of networking events and seek out the people who are feeling nervous and maybe not manage to enter into conversations. Then actively approach them. The technique that you need is to find out about them first. We in SBR talk about being interested as opposed to interesting. So find out what they are there for first.
Find out about their business, their background first. which gives you the opportunity to show interest in them, which is a good thing anyway, before you ask for a referral. But it also gives you the opportunity to customise the question you ask when you seek a referral to the sort of network that they're going to have, having listened to who they are.
So I actually don't use the word advice just because in English grammar it's slightly awkward. I talk about guidance. But you can absolutely tackle the same point you're making, Johnny. It's simply about the semantics. So I would go through giving the person who I'm talking to, whether I know them or not, a bit of a pat on the back.
There are some organizations talking about giving them a stroke, an ego boost. In other words, I'd really appreciate your guidance on who you think I should be working with next. And then you can go into asking for the referral. I think the word guidance works better than advice in that particular context.
Very simple to answer that question. The three things are, firstly, you have to be in the habit. So create an accountability mechanism for yourself to exhibit those behaviors and get you into the habit of asking for a referral at every opportunity. How to get into a habit varies for each individual, but make sure you get into the habit.
Showing 21–40 of 43 · page 2 of 3
← Previous
Next →