One of the most effective things you can do to impact your referral marketing is to create and use a Top Twenty list. The Top Twenty list refers to those referral sources that are the most active and send you your highest quality business. This group can be made up of people in your social and family networks, your colleagues, clients, and other professionals. To qualify for the list, they must send you good clients more frequently than the rest of your referral sources.

Many of you already have all of your referral sources listed in your Rolodex, address book or computer database. From here it’s very easy to create your own Top Twenty list.

Assess which of your referral sources fit the qualifications and then gather them into one separate list with their contact information. Once the list is made you can create a shortcut to it on your desktop for easy access, transfer all the names and numbers into your cell phone for effortless calling, or print out the list and keep it under your phone at the office. Putting it where you can access it easily means you are more likely to use it.

You may not have a full roster of people yet if you are just beginning to develop new clients, but don’t worry. The idea behind putting them all on one list allows you to see how many you have and reminds you that you need to add more names.

To add more names you must go where your referral sources go. If other lawyers are your best referral sources, go to bar meetings and make it a point to meet new people. Then develop these new relationships over time.

The best marketers regard the people in their Top Twenty list as friends and make a serious effort to sustain and deepen the relationships. The people that make up your Top Twenty List deserve to be recognized as a big part of your marketing plan and treated as such. To be effective in your dealings with them, you must continue to nurture the relationships and build on whatever level of trust and rapport that exists between you.

Learning how to develop and maintain a successful Top Twenty List is just one of the 21 Marketing Assets discussed in our book, How Good Attorneys Become Great Rainmakers: A Breakthrough Referral Marketing Process. In this book, which is based on our live Rainmakers program, we discuss the 21 Marketing Assets and 5 habits you must acquire on your way to mastering the process of rainmaking.

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Atticus, Inc.

This article was written by an Atticus staff member.

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