Kathy and I ate at a new restaurant recently (well, new to us) and had such a good meal we can't wait to bring our friends to it.

It's easy to recommend a restaurant. You know which of your friends eat out regularly, so you're helping them with a “need” they have. And it's pretty low-risk for them to try the restaurant out. 

That's very different to most of our services.

Firstly, most of the stuff we do isn't needed by our clients all the time. Clients might revisit their strategy or start a new leadership development program or rework their marketing every 3-5 years.

So if you've had a good experience with a consultant or coach and you want to recommend them, your first problem is that most of the people you know just won't need them for the foreseeable future. And even if they are thinking of doing something, you probably wouldn't know about it.

Secondly, recommending a consultant or coach is risky.

If you recommend a restaurant and it turns out your friends don’t have such a good time as you, it's hardly the end of the world.

Recommend someone to hire for a six-figure sum to work on a key issue like strategy or leadership and if they mess up it's a huge deal.

That's why recommending people like us isn't a no-brainer like recommending a restaurant.

But you can make it a lot easier.

If you had something that potential clients would value most of the time and that was low risk, then it would be a lot easier for people who knew you to recommend it instead of having to recommend your full service.

That something could be a free report you have, a book you've written, a presentation you do on industry trends. Anything that builds your credibility and begins to establish a relationship with your potential client – but that's easy for them to say yes to and is something they'll value even if they're not quite ready to hire you yet.

Have something like that?

If not, create one.

If you do have one, make sure your current clients and contacts know about it, know how valuable it is, and know that they can recommend your “thing” to their contacts who will get a lot of value from it immediately.

It'll make a big difference to the number of times you get recommended.