Fall Event Season Is Here. Most Agents Will Waste It.

You can have the pumpkin spice lattes and the pumpkin patches, Fall is event season if you are an entrepreneur. 

The school fundraisers start up, the charity galas get scheduled, the community festivals, the chamber mixers, the client appreciation nights. For an entrepreneur trying to grow through relationships, this is the richest stretch of the year for making new connections.

And most of us blow it.

Here's what usually happens: you see the event on the calendar, you tell yourself it's a good chance to meet people, sometimes you show up, you shake some hands, you hand out a few cards, you have three pleasant conversations you mostly forget by Monday. Then nothing comes of it, and you decide events don't really work for your business.

The failure happened before you ever walked in the door.

You showed up cold, you didn't know who else would be there, you hadn't spoken to any of them, online or off, so every conversation started from zero. You had no idea going in whether the person in front of you was even a fit for how you work. And you had nothing to offer them beyond your name and your title. Live Local Marketers don't wing it. 

That's not networking; that's collecting business cards you'll never call.

Referral marketing, the kind I teach local service pros through The Connector Blueprint, has never been about working a room. It's about warming up relationships before the room ever happens, so that when you finally meet in person, it isn't a first contact, it's a next step in qualifying whether this business owner, this entrepreneur, this charity leader will be a good fit as a referral partner. 

The agents who come out of Fall event season with real referral connections aren't better at small talk, they just did the quiet work ahead of time. They'd already been in those people's feeds for weeks, and they walked in with an idea, not just a handshake.

That's the difference between a stack of forgotten cards and a fall that actually builds your pipeline. The events are already on the calendar, the only question is whether you show up ready or show up cold.

When you think back on the last networking event you went to, how many of those people did you ever actually follow up with?