The Cycle Never Ends. Until He Changed Who He Sold To.

"In the day I sell. At night I work. The cycle never ends." This is one of the stories from my "301 Do-it-Yourself Marketing Ideas" book, which I wrote years ago.

That was Paul Lewis's problem running MC2 Corporation, a computer network design and installation firm. If he was working, he had no time to sell. If he was selling, he had no time to work. He couldn't afford a salesperson either.

So he stopped selling to end customers directly and targeted a different kind of client: law firms and accounting firms, the people who talk to their own clients every single day.

His logic was simple. Do great work for them, and they'll be the ones recommending him. He poured effort into serving these firms well, then handed them a stack of business cards and asked them to pass his name along if he'd earned it.

Within two weeks of finishing his first law firm job, he got his first referral. That year, his sales grew 700% over the year before, at zero acquisition cost. Eight years later, MC2 was worth $10 million.

The lesson isn't "get referrals"... everyone knows that. It's this: from what I've seen, it pays to pick referral sources who talk to your exact customers every day as part of their own job, then serve them so well that talking about you becomes obvious.

Who talks to your exact customers every day that you haven't asked to refer you yet?