Bill Cates - Referral Coach

This week on The Massimo Show Rod sat down with an internationally recognized client-acquisition expert, author, and speaker - Bill Cates.

Bill has delivered his business-growth message to over 300,000 professionals, small business owners, and salespeople across 5 continents; helping them increase revenue without increasing their marketing budget.

Bill is the author of four popular books: Get More Referrals Now, Don’t Keep Me a Secret, Beyond Referrals, and Radical Relevance.

Bill Cates’ client-acquisition system has been featured in such publications as Success Magazine, Entrepreneur Magazine, Selling Power, the Huffington Post, and The Wall Street Journal. His own business’s success has been featured in Money Magazine.

Bill was born and Raised in Silver Springs, Maryland just outside of Washington, DC. While attending the University of Maryland he was a drummer in a rock n roll band who turned professional after college, even touring the country after he finished graduate school. While they were fairly successful Bill knew enough to realize he didn't want to play at Holiday Inns for the rest of his life. After working for American Airlines in customer service he got the itch to own his own business.

A woman was selling her cookbook at a "pick your own strawberry" farms. She stole all his ideas and he was not compensated for it. He thought “I could do better than this” so he identified 1500 pick your own strawberry farms around the county and got an offer to write a cookbook and sell it to the farmers. The first year he sold 15000 copies of the book. He moved on to an apple and honey cookbook. It was a niche for the farmers. Bill was selling around 80000 copies of his cookbooks a year. He started selling in kitchen stores, gourmet shops, and grocery stores. He then moved on to writing specialty cookbooks for equipment manufacturers. He wrote for Weber grills, a smoker company, a cookie cookbook for American Greeting Cards. He created this niche of smaller cookbooks. He built the business until it was saleable and publishing his cookbooks was going great.

They say liberal arts majors make good entrepreneurs because they learn how to learn and teach. Bil sold several businesses and was looking for the next thing to do. A friend of his said “you should be a professional speaker” so he started hanging out at the National Speaker Association.

After trying his hand at running a book publishing company he discovered his passion for speaking and teaching other entrepreneurs.

It didn’t matter if Bill was getting gigs for his band, soothing ruffled feathers of airline clients, or connecting with farmers over a great recipe - he was learning to make real connections. This led to Bill’s niche - referral marketing. Bill believes in the power of multiplying your best clients.

“It doesn’t cost money to do that,” Bill notes. “What I learned is not only about referrals but about introductions. Make sure you are getting introduced to the people who will give you referrals. Referrals and introductions work because of borrowed trust. Make sure to have a Value Check-in. This is when you check-in in along the way so your client knows the value we are bringing. To see that we are exceeding their expectation because most businesses don’t check in enough. When you check-in and ask how do you think we are doing? When you bring that openness to checking in on a regular basis, that is the beginning step for asking for an introduction. It solidifies the connection.”

Rod and Bill go on to discuss the delegation of 5 things that will free you up to do the things that need to be done:

1. The sales division is handled by a referral network and reputation.
2. Marketing by speaking in key conferences, newsletters, blogs. Reputation building and maintenance. Run by his team.
3. Personnel- marketing run by his team.
4. Operations use CRM.
5. Finance has an accounting team and book-keeping service

Bill and Rod end with some helpful information on how to multiply your best clients in five steps and more about Bill’s books Beyond Referrals and Radical Relevance