Referral Marketing: Space Cake!

Last night, we celebrated two birthdays in my family. One of those people is intolerant to gluten, so I made a gluten free spice cake. It turned out to be fairly good and many people sampled it. At one point in the evening, someone asked, "So how did you make the space cake, I mean spice cake?" Everyone thought that was kinda funny ... guess you really had to be there.

It did, however, make me think immediately of this blog entry ... calling it space cake. Why? It made me think of what can happen in your business if someone mis-interprets what you do. Or if someone on your word of mouth marketing team shares a wrong message for you. Or if someone has the opportunity to refer you and totally blows it by saying something they really shouldn't have ... but they didn't know any better.

These kinds of mishaps ARE avoidable. They can be limited or even totally eliminated when you take the time to educate your referral sources on how to refer you properly. If you want a certain kind of referral, you need to teach people. If you want to be introduced a certain way, you need to teach people how to do it for you. It's not rocket science, but for whatever reason, most people forget this part of the referral process.

So, if you don't want your business to sound like "space cake" ... start teaching people today!