In years gone by, if you were about to place a referral to someone in another state, or a part of your own state with which you were unfamiliar, what did you do?
I bet a few of you out there would open the CRS book, page through until you found the area for which you were placing the referral, then you would close your eyes, find the top and bottom of the page, then trace your finger up and down, until you stopped, opened your eyes and, viola, the pick was made.
(I did a version of that on stage at a recent Raincamp, complete with hand gestures and extra exaggeration on the part where you would be picking a random person to which to refer your valuable client, and the President of CRS was in the crowd. He made sure to come by and say hi during one of the breaks and let me know that CRS is more than just a referral network. I was pretty embarrased.......but I also know CRS has helped tons of REALTORS® learn technology in a rapidly evolving business)
For those of you with large national brands, you may have gone to your company website, or relocation department so you were sure your clients was in the hands of someone your company had deemed worthy. Or maybe, you just went online and did a google search for that area in an attempt to find an agent. I bet you there are 15 or 20 other ways people could share of how they found professionals to whom they could refer clients.
That was before ActiveRain (or at least before your involvement here). If you are active in the Rain, the first place you go to find someone to refer business is ActiveRain. You drill down on their city (of course, you have to know the County sometimes, but Google is always our friend there) and dive into their blog. How do they operate their business? If they blog, you can usually tell. How do they treat their clients? What kind of a person are they? This is all stuff you can ascertain from a well written blog.
I'll bet there are some of you out there who have never been more comfortable making a referral than when you have made one to another ActiveRain member. I'd like you to share your story.
Susan Mangigian inspired me to write this post. Her thank you post aimed at Neal Bloom is a tremendous testimonial to referral relationships in the Rain. Everyone in the real estate industry should be so lucky as to have such a thoughtful and well written post aimed at them. Who wouldn't want to refer to Neal after reading this post?
This isn't really a contest. But, I will award points to posts I read that are inspiring, in the way Susan's was. I'm not going to explain it. Read her post, you'll see what I mean. I'd ask that you leave a link to your post in the comment section of this post. That way I will see them all. So many of you in the Rain have made referrals to other ActiveRainers and the results have been fabulous for you, for them, but most important, for your client. If you have old posts where you have trumpeted one of your referral partners here in the Rain, I'd love to read those as well.
Again, not a formal contest or challenge, but that only means that there is no limit on the amount of points we can give out for some great testimonials of your fellow Rainers.
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