 | How Link And Learn Was Born Out Of Blogging | It was one of my own Aha! moments ... | Posted on: 04/09/2013 By: Jacky Sherman |
I've been writing a new blog post every week for eight months now, so that's 33 articles! Phew! That's a lot of writing. Now, I started this with a simplistic objective to increase my visibility with my target audience, demonstrate my knowledge and hopefully engage with people who are interested in getting business by referrals ...
A montage of images from some of my blog posts that helped me come up with my hugely successful Link And Learn events!
A side effect I wasn't expecting was how it has helped me reflect on my own knowledge and create new approaches as a result. The biggest of these, has been my Link and Learn events.
Looking back I realise that the idea behind this came from bringing together my thoughts expressed in many of these blog posts. This week I thought I'd re-visit some of them and their relevance to these new events.
The concept of Link and Learn could not have been formed without the clear sense of purpose around building communities. It is all about bringing together people with a common sense of purpose, who are in a position to help each other.
My blog post last week crystallised this concept for me; this was the driving force behind what I want to achieve: The Referral Institute Mission Statement and why I love it so much.
A key step in my thinking came when I wrote about defining your target market using Charlotte Sykes (Sykes and Co) as the example: Aha! So that's who she wants to meet. Charlotte set her target market as Logistics firms who are looking to recruit excellent administrative and management people and therefore wanted to meet others who also worked with Logistics firms. And she was finding it difficult. Aha! What if I brought together, in one room, people who shared a common target market?
What is a Referral Partner added in thoughts on how to develop reciprocal relationships. Something like that is not achieved overnight and needs you to share some common experience and time together. Aha! What if I facilitated people having a shared experience and spending some time together?
As a client, Charlotte bought into the concept central to the Referral Institute method that your referral partners needed to know how to play the same game as you and a key way to do that was to bring them along to my workshops as her guest.
This concept of getting everyone to play the game to the same rules was one of my earliest blog posts called You And Your Network. Are you playing the same game? Not everyone wants to play! Aha! What if I gathered together people who shared that common market AND did want to play AND taught them a common set of rules for the game?
Another key concept around my workshops, is that participants learn from each other as well as from me. They share their wisdom and give each other feedback. My blog post called Knowledge Is Knowing A Tomato Is A Fruit summed this up nicely.
Aha! What if I ran an event with business people:
Who share a common target market, Gave them time together to get to know each other, Gave them a shared experience, Taught them a common set of rules, Enabled them to share their wisdom.
As Charlotte is my client and someone I have grown to know, like and trust, I know several good contacts and it's a key local industry. Why not run one around suppliers to the Logistics companies? How do you find your referral partners?.
We held the first Link And Learn event on the 1st August 2013 and participants met new contacts who also worked with logistics firms. They found it increased the depth of their knowledge on referral marketing and how to apply it to their circumstances leading to many Aha! moments.
As that is when they get the true learning, it transforms their lives and has motivated me to run more events encompassing Life, The Universe And Everything.
If you want to find out more about my up and coming Link And Learn events then do visit my Eventbrite page and book onto those you feel are appropriate. Call me on +44 (0) 7970 638857 or click here to ping over an email and let's chat about how I can help you.
Until next time ...
JACKY SHERMAN
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