It occurred to me recently that the bulk of my business has come from this one technique.
But it’s something I do that I’d never taught explicitly. Or ever seen taught.
If you’ve followed my work at all, you’ve heard about how important it is to identify your hubs. To think about, ‘who is it I’m trying to reach? And who’s already connected to them? Where can I find them?’
And you might have also heard me harp on how critical it is to have a customer database. Huge.
But let’s combine those two notions: database + hubs = a database of your hubs.
Here’s a practical thing you can do immediately that could change your business entirely.
Create a spreadsheet in excel or what have you with the following columns:
Priority: what priority are they to you? how good a hub? Try to give everyone on it a 1, 2 or a 3. 1 is a super good hub and 3 is just okay’.
Type: in my case there are holistic schools as one type. Then there are groups, holistic centers, people, retail and online listing type hubs.
Niche: what niches are they focused on? In my case, it’s either green or holistic or both.
Group/Business Name:
Contact Name: Who is the best person for you to talk with there to make things happen?
City/Province: Where are they? If you’re limiting your reach to a city – you might make it neighbourhood based. If you’re international, you might make it country based.
Email:
Website:
Who Referred Them: This is great to keep track of. Then when you call them or email them you can remember to say, “I was talking with _____ and they said to call you.”
And I would challenge you to see if you can come up with 100 hubs for your business. This sounds hard but it’s actually easy once you sit down and really focus on it. Once you’ve got this database you’ve got a lot of directions you can go. You’ve got a list of key people to invite to your special parties, to take to lunch, to give special invites to on your events, to ask to spread the word to their lists. How to use this list is another topic. But having this kind of database can be a total game changer for people.
If you’d like get cool posts like this in your inbox every few days CLICK HERE to subscribe to my blog and you’ll also get a free copy of my fancy new ebook “Marketing for Hippies” when it’s done.
Connect with Me: