How To Be Referable

Referrals are a large source of leads for many businesses, yet it surprises me how little attention is paid to creating a strategy to make a business more referable. Our special guest today, Mike Roderick, is an expert at getting people talking about you when you are not in the room (in a good way). I can’t wait to dig into this!

Join?Tim Fitzpatrick?and?Mike Roderick?for this week’s episode of The Rialto Marketing Podcast!

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How To Be Referable

Tim Fitzpatrick

Referrals are a large source of leads for so many businesses, yet it surprises me how little attention is paid to actually creating a strategy to make a business more referable. Our special guest today is an expert at getting people talking about you when you're not in the room, and that means in a good way. So I cannot wait to dig into this. I know you're going to love it, so please stay tuned. I am Tim Fitzpatrick with Rialto Marketing, where we believe you've got to remove your revenue roadblocks if you want to accelerate revenue growth. I want to thank you so much for taking the time to tune in. Super excited to have with me Michael Roderick with Small Pond Enterprises. Michael, thanks for taking the time.

Michael Roderick: Yeah, thanks so much for having me. Excited to be here.

Tim Fitzpatrick: Yes, I can't wait to dig into this. I'm going to ask you some rapid fire questions to kick things off. Are you good to go?

Michael Roderick: Sure. Of course.

Tim Fitzpatrick: When you're not working, how do you like to spend your time?

Michael Roderick: I love reading. I also am a huge fan of going to Marvel movies when they first come out.

Tim Fitzpatrick: Okay, cool. Nonfiction, fiction, both? Does it matter?

Michael Roderick: Usually a lot of non-fiction. I like reading a lot of business books and psychology and stuff like that is usually what I enjoy.

Tim Fitzpatrick: What's your hidden talent?

Michael Roderick: Probably being able to see where things connect, being able to see the gaps in things.

Tim Fitzpatrick: That's a pretty cool hidden talent.

Michael Roderick: Thanks.

Tim Fitzpatrick: What's the best piece of advice you've ever been given?

Michael Roderick: Best piece of advice came from somebody on the Broadway investment side. He recommended that I clean my pipeline was the way that he talked about it. And it was really just the idea to curate the network of people that I was making introductions for and to. And that idea of curating and just being very thoughtful about who you bring into your life was a game changer for me.

Tim Fitzpatrick: What's one thing about you that surprises people?

Michael Roderick: I have an irrational love of Beyonce and will do imprompt dances to her music videos while doing the dishes.

Tim Fitzpatrick: That's a good one. Nobody has ever said that before. I love that. An irrational love of Beyonce, so much so that it's going to make Jay-Z jealous?

Michael Roderick: Sorry, Jay Z.

Tim Fitzpatrick: What does success mean to you?

Michael Roderick: Just being able to make as many things happen for everybody as possible.

Tim Fitzpatrick: Where's your happy place?

Michael Roderick: With my daughters.

Tim Fitzpatrick: How many do you have?

Michael Roderick: I've got two. Juniper, who's six, and Diana, who's three.

Tim Fitzpatrick: They grow up fast, man.

Michael Roderick: Yes. Indeed.

Tim Fitzpatrick: What qualities do you value in the people you spend time with?

Michael Roderick: Honesty, transparency, thoughtfulness, creativity.

Tim Fitzpatrick: Before we dig into how to be referable, I want people to learn more about just what you're doing at Small Pond. Who are you working with? How are you helping them?

Michael Roderick: Yeah. So the way that I like to think about it is I love helping thoughtful givers become thought leaders. So usually people who are very good at doing the work and solving the problems for their clients tend to deprioritize the packaging of their own intellectual property. They put off coming up with their own frameworks, their own models, their own things, usually at the expense of their notoriety. I love helping those subject matter experts become the stars.

Tim Fitzpatrick: I love it. You're helping bring visibility and helping pull out of their business. What frameworks, what systems are you using that make you unique?

Michael Roderick: Exactly. What will make you referable? What will make it so that other people are talking about you when you're not there?

The Three Keys to Being Referable

Tim Fitzpatrick: I love it. What are the three main things we need to focus on to be referable?

Michael Roderick: There are three main concepts, and it's easy to remember them because it spells the word AIM. You want to think about taking AIM when you're working on referability. The first is accessibility. This is always the first hurdle because we live in what I like to refer to as the echo chamber of the enlightened. We get into this place where when we're in an industry, everybody's saying the same things and using the same words, so we think everybody else is going to use those words as well. But if we go outside of our industry, a lot of the time, people have no idea what we're talking about. And if we want more people to talk about us, they have to feel comfortable talking about us. And if we are using too much jargon or being too inside baseball with our language, a lot of people are going to feel awkward trying to suss out, like, well, what did those words mean? How does it sound? And the main reason why we don't talk to somebody about something else is that we feel that we're not qualified to talk about it. Any time that we feel like, Oh, man, I don't know how to explain it, we usually will not talk about it because it makes us look bad.

Tim Fitzpatrick: Yeah, got it. They need to understand what we do in a non technical way in plain language.

Michael Roderick: Exactly. The way I like to think about it is give yourself an F. Don't think about what it is that you do. Think about what it is that you do for the client. Get really clear on what is that thing that you're doing, and then you just boil that down into the simplest of concepts because that's usually the challenge that most people have is if it's not a simple concept, it's not going to feel accessible to them.

Tim Fitzpatrick: Got it. So what's I?

Michael Roderick: I is influence. And most of the time when we think about influence, we think about it in the context of persuasion. We think about it in the context of how do I get you to do something, get you by using these tools, by using these techniques, all those different elements. But true influence is when you do something without me asking you to do it. So the question is, what will cause you to do something without me asking you to. Well, if it makes you look better, you'll do it. If it makes you look good. So most of the time when we're thinking about our packaging of our ideas and our concepts, we're thinking about how do I look cool? What is cool to me or what's interesting to me? And what we want to do is we want to think about, if somebody else were to share this idea, how would they look cool? How would they look interesting? How would they look like the person who really has this cool concept or this cool idea? And most of the time with our concepts and our ideas, we don't package them in that way. We don't make them something that somebody else will want to go and share with others because it actually makes them look better when they share it.

Tim Fitzpatrick: Do you have a simple example of this?

Michael Roderick: Sure. There's lots and lots of stuff that's out there that falls into this category, but probably the easiest is a meme. Any time a meme gets shared, it basically helps the reputation of the person sharing the meme. They're suddenly seen as the funny person because they found the meme of the ladies yelling at the cat and they overlaid whatever their concept is or whatever their idea is. Where it's like, they put up above the ladies, most people looking at my copy, me saying, you have to be simple with your copy, or something like that. And we all laugh and we're like, oh, that was so funny. That's what that is. It's that aspect of we share something and then people are like, oh, my God, that's so funny. I want to show it to other people so I can be funny, so I can look cool, too. And we do this across the board. If you write a post about the Netflix series that you watched and you write this long thing, you are marketing for that Netflix series. You are sharing that message. Why? Because it makes you look interesting. It makes you look like the person who watched the series, who has insights about the series. So it makes you look better, so that's why you're sharing it.

Tim Fitzpatrick: So what I'm hearing, tell me sometimes I'm a little slow on the uptake, the information that we're putting out there about our business, we want it to be shareable so that people want to actually share it. And the reason they're going to want to share it is because it makes them look good.

Michael Roderick: Exactly. This is why most of the personality tests and things have done so well, because you can then take that thing and then show it to somebody else and it makes you look cool. It makes you look interesting. You're the one who found the Meyers Briggs. You're the one who found the disk and you brought it to your network. You look interesting as a result of the fact that you have this tool. Let's say you're a coach or a consultant and you have a tool that helps somebody solve a problem or figure something out, and you share that tool in one of your conversations with somebody, they then go and use that tool with somebody else and they're like, Have you seen this thing? And it just keeps going from there.

Tim Fitzpatrick: Well, another example, we're shooting on StreamYard. I use StreamYard all the time. I talk to people about it when it comes up in conversation because I love the tool and it makes things simple for me. Another example there. I love that. We have accessibility, we have influence. What's M?

Michael Roderick: M is memory. You could have the best material in the world. You could have the best content, the best ideas. You could be heads and tails above pretty much everybody else in your industry. But if somebody else comes up with something easier to remember, you lose because we share and we talk about and we use what we remember. So if you are not building in memory triggers for people, if you're not making it so easy to remember their concept that basically they can just go out and share it with somebody else, they're going to share the one that's easier to remember. They're going to share the one that's easier to transfer that information because going back to the accessibility point, nobody wants to look stupid when they're sharing something. So if I said here's the 32 points about referability, then everybody would be like, this live stream would be over by the time I get to, I don't know, 22 or maybe even five. And nobody would remember it. Nobody would be able to transfer that information. Basically, you want to get to a point where I'm saying accessibility, influence, memory, and it spells the word AIM, you should be able to carry that mentally and share that with somebody else.

Focus on LESS to be Remembered More

Tim Fitzpatrick: Using acronyms is one way to do that. What other ways do you like? I know you like acronyms.

Michael Roderick: Yes. I'm a huge fan of acronyms. From memory, I have one very specific one that I use where it's like, if you want to be remembered more, you focus on less. And less is language, emotion, simplicity, and structure. I'll start with language. The reason why a lot of people know who Shakespeare is and only the English majors know who Christopher Marlowe is, even though they were writing right around the same time, is that Shakespeare added new words to the English language. People were going around using those words and everybody was like, Well, where did you get those words from? And if you're the person who has specific words, you basically carve a piece of mental real estate in somebody's brain. I'll literally do it right now because if I say to you Venti, there is no brand that you are going to say other than a Venti coffee.

Tim Fitzpatrick: Yeah, right? I don't even drink coffee.

Michael Roderick: Exactly. So the thing that most subject matter experts, folks who have done coaching consulting thing miss is that they don't actually come up with their own language for a lot of things. So they'll describe the challenge that they are having, but it's a very general challenge that their clients are going through, or they'll describe what their process is, and it's got a very generic name. And as a result, it's not going to stick in somebody's memory. So if I tell you, Join my next level Mastermind, I can throw a rock and I'm going to hit somebody else who's got a next level Mastermind. But if I say join my Mastermind hit makers, then now you're curious. You're like, What is hit makers? How does that work? Because that's the language. I'm really dialing it in. And another example of this is if you've ever heard of Gay Hendrix and the book The Big Leap, he came up with this concept called the upper limit problem, and he named it. He named it the upper limit problem. So what happens? People then go and they remember that concept no matter how long ago they read the book because it's simple.

Michael Roderick: It's simple to remember. It's simple to recall because there's specific language that is already part of your brain that you're already thinking about.

Tim Fitzpatrick: So you're branding within your company.

Michael Roderick: Exactly. This is a thing that if you're changing the name of something and giving it your own name can sometimes double or triple the price that you're able to charge for that thing. And a perfect example of this, one of my favorite stories about this is Hair Club for Men. If you're familiar with Hair Club for Men, there was these 3 AM commercials that used to come on, and there was this guy, and he was like, I'm part of the Hair Club for Men, and I used to be bald, and here's my luscious head of hair. All Hair Club for Men was, was they took your existing hair and they weaved it into a toupé for you and they gave you a toupé. That was literally what it was. But they called it the Hair Club for Men, and they said that you could use their patented strand by strand method to replace your hair. So while most people would spend like 10 bucks on a toupé, these people were spending, I don't know, 50, 30 bucks a month to be part of the Hair Club for Men. So think about how much more Hair Club for Men made just because they came up with language versus the people who are just selling a toupé.

Tim Fitzpatrick: As you're talking about this, what popped into my brain is Dollar Shave Club. Yeah. Another one right there like, branded it's like you're subscribing to Razors.

Michael Roderick: Yeah, exactly. That's the thing. It's the idea of it changed the concept of you go to buy your Razors alone to you get to be part of a community that gets your Razors. This is the thing. There are lots and lots of people in the world who they will spend more money to be part of a club than to go alone and buy whatever it is that they buy.

Tim Fitzpatrick: I love it. We've got language. We need to come up with our own language, our own terms, our own branding to make our product services more memorable.

Michael Roderick: Yeah, exactly.

Tim Fitzpatrick: Now we've got the E and the double S.

Michael Roderick: Yes. So the E is emotion. And the thing to understand about emotion is that emotion basically solidifies memory. When we are in a heightened state, it's often referred to in psychology as emotional arousal, our brains tend to basically retain more information. And that comes from in primitive times when we were attacked, we had to remember all of the details of where we were attacked, otherwise, we wouldn't survive. So our brains have always retained that aspect of when we are in this heightened emotional state, we need to retrieve and hold information better. So the thing that you always want to think about with your own work, if you want things to be more referable on the emotional side is you want to cause somebody to feel emotion because they will then remember the material that you're sharing. The easiest way that I can break this down is if you imagine a movie that made you cry, you can very vividly recall the scene that made you cry. You can see that scene probably in your mind and see all of the details. And if you had a really hard experience in your life, if I asked you to tell me about in detail about what you would consider to be the saddest day of your life, you are very likely to have a lot of details that will come up because in that moment, you were experiencing that emotional arousal and you were basically retaining all those details during that time. So if we infuse emotion into the concepts that we're talking about, and somebody feels that emotion in that moment, they'll actually remember the material better. And if we can get them to do that and we can get them to feel that emotion and remember that material better, the next time they experience that emotion, they're actually going to think about us. They're going to think about what we were talking about. And that's what makes it easier from a memory standpoint.

Tim Fitzpatrick: How do we do that? Are you talking about specific emotions they may feel, or is it actually in the material just getting them to feel a specific way?

Michael Roderick: Yeah. So it's more about... You're doing it from a client, from a marketing standpoint. It's more about you taking them into the emotion of whatever experience you want them to feel in that marketing. So if you are going the pain direction and you're trying to communicate, this is a frustration, then you're writing something or creating something that causes them to be in that moment for themselves. So one of the easiest ones is the idea of being left out, because everybody has an experience of being left out. But if you get super granular and you talk about this one time where you were sitting at this diner and you were alone because your significant other left you and you're sitting in this diner really upset and there were these girls across the way from you and they were laughing at you hysterically because you were this lonely guy sitting over there. Any guy starts to feel that and starts to have that moment of like, oh, man. Now, if you literally in the next sentence say, well, here's the reason why. I didn't realize that I was going... Why I felt so bad, but now I realized that I was missing this component of mindset. And this component of mindset, when you're talking to women or being around women, is exactly what you need so that you don't repel them like I did when I was in the diner. What happens? You're going to remember that story. Why? Because I created the details because I filled you with the emotion. Now, the next time you sit in a diner, what's going to happen?

Tim Fitzpatrick: Yeah, you're going to think about that.

Michael Roderick: Exactly. exactly. So anytime we start to bring emotion into the work, we're basically wiring somebody else to feel that emotion, to recognize that location, to recognize that moment, and in many cases, to connect with us. If you notice, most of the Ted Talks that you'll see, they open with some emotional story of the speaker before they get into what the framework is or what the model is. Why? Because that opens the audience up before. And this is not just sadness, this is humor as well. The second that somebody starts or does something with humor, we all let our guard down for a second. And now we're going to remember that material more because we just had a nice little laugh and we remember when we had that laugh.

Tim Fitzpatrick: Language, emotions. Two S's.

Michael Roderick: Yeah. Next is simplicity. And throughout most of our lives, we have been rewarded by academics for complexity. So if you look at school, success was writing the bigger papers, using the bigger words. The idea of complexity meant that you were smarter. Everything in school hinges on the idea of it's more complex. You're in advanced algebra, you're doing this, you're doing that. So we get programmed as a result of our education, usually, to feel like complexity is what makes us impressive because that's what we learned in school. But memory rewards simplicity because our brains can only process so much information at any one point in time. So if I were to say, go to the grocery store and get me milk, bread, and cheese, you are totally fine. And you can go and you can get the groceries and you have no problem. But if I say go to the grocery store, get me milk, bread, cheese, some protein powder, a little bit of Drano. I also think I need some sponges. And could you stop by the pet store on the way and get a Chewy toy for the neighbor's dog? I'm not getting it. I'm not getting anything. Because the brain can't hold all of that information. We've all had these experiences where we lose information if our brain is overwhelmed. If there's too much information coming at us, our brain is like, which thing do I hold on to? So if we want somebody to remember something, we have to make sure that there is simplicity there. Otherwise, they're going to forget things. They're going to drop things. They're not going to carry that information. And as a result, if they're not carrying the information that we want them to carry, they're going to basically sub in information that we don't want them to carry. And this is one of the main things that causes problems with referrals is if somebody basically is like, Here's all the things that I do or that I'm about, and they list 15 different things, well, somebody's going to latch on to one of those things. And it may not be the thing that you want everybody to talk about. But that's what they're going to latch on to because you basically gave them a fruit salad of ideas of what you could actually do for the client.

Tim Fitzpatrick: Simplicity. So a couple of quotes coming to mind here. One is complexity is the enemy of results. That has always stuck with me. The other one is I have always said this was Leonardo DA Vinci, but I think it's been attributed to somebody else, but simplicity is the ultimate sophistication. Gosh, it's so easy to overcomplicate things. To boil things down into their simplest form is actually a lot of work, but damn, if we can do it, it's so much more effective.

Michael Roderick: Oh, yeah. That's the thing. It's like you want to be careful of idea creep. So if you've ever dealt with websites, there's a concept called feature creep, where basically you can make a website completely inoperable by basically adding all of these features that nobody actually wants, and then they can't actually use the site. And ultimately, if we look at it, this is why people are on the book of faces and why nobody is on My space anymore or even remembers My space. Because My space was subjected to feature creep where it would take 20 hours to load somebody's page because they decided to play music and have dancing things falling in the background and all of this other stuff. Whereas Facebook was literally like, Okay, here you go. Here's a bunch of people. You can search for them. You can put a post up. It was super simple. So that had way more adoption. And Twitter had even way more adoption than that because it basically was like, Okay, yeah, we're just going to take the status update. And that's the platform. That's it. That's the platform. Google started as just one page of a search engine. There was nothing else. You just went to this little thing, typed in something, and looked to see where it would take you. And that's the thing. When you really take the time to strip down and get to that level of simplicity, people remember, they talk about it more, they're able to carry that information, they're able to transfer and share that information with others.

Tim Fitzpatrick: What's coming to mind here, too, is when?we talk about messaging?and we work on messaging with clients, we talk about this concept of what do you want to be known for? What are you really focusing in on that one thing because you can't be remembered for 10 different things.

Michael Roderick: That's right.

Tim Fitzpatrick: You've got to make a choice of what... That doesn't mean you can't do other things, but you got to choose what that tip of the spear is going to be. And you've got to lead with that. Because if you tell them, Oh, well, yeah, I'm in marketing. I can help your client do SEO and social media and website design and content marketing and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, they're lost. When it comes to simplicity, we got to make that choice and we got to lead with that.

Michael Roderick: Yes, 100%. Especially when you're dealing with a cold market because people, when they're just being introduced to you, they can't process a lot of information. They just want to hear what's the cliff notes on this particular thing. And this is a mistake a lot of people make. They're trying to communicate their value, so they're sharing everything that they think is valuable, and it actually makes them less valuable in the other person's eyes.

Tim Fitzpatrick: Language, emotion, simplicity. We got one more S.

Michael Roderick: Structure. Our brains need order in order to be able to process information. If we have an order or a structure, we'll be much more likely to remember the material and to remember what the story is or how it all works. So if something has a structure to it, we're able to process and go through that structure and then repeat that structure for others. But if we don't have a structure, then we're not sure what to talk about first. We're not sure what to talk about second. We're not sure what the order is of everything. If somebody gives us a structure, then we're able to be like, Oh, okay. And if that structure follows a logical progression, then it's much, much easier to share. So for example, if we go back, I talked about accessibility, influence, and memory. Logically, from a structural standpoint, you have to start with accessibility. You have to start with people being able to understand you in order to even get to that point of influence, where you're able to come up with things that you want to share with them. But then even when you get to that point where you understand conceptually, this is how I'm going to think about creating my material, well, then you're going to be like, Well, but wait a second. I need to make sure that they remember it, and I need to make sure that people will actually share this. So that leads you into memory. And once you're in memory, that leads you down into this concept of language, emotion, simplicity, and structure, because it breaks down each of the pieces, and it makes it much, much easier for you as the listener to process, to think about, and to look at when it comes to your own work and your own material. Most of the time, the mistake that I see, and I see this in offers, I see this in the way that people talk about their services, is that there actually is no structure to it. It's all over the map. When it's all over the map and there's no structure, how are we going to share it? We're not going to share that information.

Tim Fitzpatrick: This can be done with acronyms. You've given us two great ones today. Other frameworks, systems, something that's going to put it in something that's easy to remember and that there's this logical flow or path.

Michael Roderick: Exactly. Visuals are a major one as well, where if you draw me a chart, or you show me a Maslow's hierarchy triangle, or you show me a Venn diagram, I'm going to get it. I'm going to understand it because that material is very clear to me. I've seen those things before. And if you show me something that I've already seen before, but you have some innovation on it, then that structure, that process is going to work for me to be able to share it with other people because I already know how to draw it. I know how to break it down. I know how to do it. And this is why you'll see things like when somebody's explaining something, they're going to draw a box, they're going to draw a circle, they're going to draw a triangle. Why? Because everybody knows what those shapes are and what they look like. They're not going to draw a crazy star or a decaedrant or whatever. They're not going to do that. They're going to go with the simplest of things, and then they're going to bring their ideas and their concepts to it.

Tim Fitzpatrick: I was going to say that breaks the simplicity rule, right?

Michael Roderick: Exactly. The second you start, yeah, being like, Yeah, here's my chart of how you're supposed to think about your ideas.

Tim Fitzpatrick: It probably helps that I'm a horrible artist, so I have to keep things simple there. I start to draw a star and it doesn't look right.?

You Need to Have a "Magic Trick"

Tim Fitzpatrick: Yeah. Man, this has been awesome, Michael. I want to ask you a couple more questions or more things before we go. You talked about this concept of a magic trick, right? What is this and why do thought leaders need one?

Michael Roderick: Sure. If you've ever been to a party and you've seen a magician perform, very, very often that magician has at least one trick that they can show you the trick, and then they can go back and actually show you how they did the trick. So all magicians have something that is so simple to them that they can teach an audience member how to do it. They can teach you how to make the card disappear behind your hand, shove the pencil up your nose. There's a couple of them that are very simple visual tricks that you can do. What's the next thing that most people will do when they learn something like that? They will then go to a party and do that thing because it makes them look like the magician. It makes them look interesting. So as thought leaders, you want to have things that other people can do that they can basically show somebody else and look really interesting and cool doing it. And one of the classics of this is the golden circle from the classic Start with Y Simon Sinnic talk. Everybody can draw a circle and look smart in front of their friends. By doing that, literally being like, what? Why? How? They can do that. It's so simple. So it's a magic trick. It's literally something that when people show it, everybody says, Well, where did you learn that? And it refers back to that talk. It refers back to that presentation. So as a thought leader, you want to think about what is your magic trick? What is something that you can share that when people see it, they're like, Wow, that was super cool. I want to show other people how to do that. I want to show other people what that is. I want to share that with others. And there's tons of Ted Talks that have done this. The classic Amy Cuddy power pose is a perfect example. She shows you how to do the power pose, and then what a bunch of people go out and do, they go out and do the power pose before they... That's the thing. As a thought leader, in your world, whatever it is that you're sharing, you want to think about, Okay, what is that magic trick? What is that thing that I can show somebody super quick where they're like, I need to show that to somebody else. That was super cool. I want to write that thing down. I want to draw that thing out for somebody. The classic, the hedgehog concept in Good to Great, where you do the Venn diagram of what do you love, what do you get paid for? What are you best in the world at? And here's the center. What do people then go and do? They go and they draw the hedgehog concept for everybody. They go through that process and what do they do? They refer back to Good to Great.

Tim Fitzpatrick: Man, I love how all this stuff is so interconnected because that also goes back to the I in AIM of influence. Creating things that are shareable. They're so simple for people to remember that they want to go out and share it and help other people and make themselves.

Michael Roderick: Exactly.

In Conclusion: How To Be Referable

Tim Fitzpatrick: Dude. So if you've been paying attention to this conversation, Michael has just done every single thing that he has recommended you do to become memorable. So just rewatch, relisten to this, and you'll know all this stuff that you need to know. He's just done exactly what he told us we need to do. So well done, Michael. Any last minute thoughts that you want to leave us with today?

Michael Roderick: Yeah, I think that it's really important to do what I like to refer to as the check for understanding. So when I was teaching high school, the check for understanding is an educational concept where basically if I'm teaching something, I would stop in the middle of the lesson and I'd ask a student in the class to tell me in their own words what I had just taught. And that helps me understand, are they actually getting it? Are they actually picking up on it? And you want to do this with your messaging and your concepts. You want to share those concepts with somebody, and then you want to ask, what did you hear? What did you actually get out of it? Because that's going to tell you what other people are experiencing, what other people are hearing. And that's the most important thing. The thing that will keep you from so much opportunity is not understanding what your market is hearing. If you don't understand what your market is hearing when you speak, if you don't know how they're processing it, you're going to have a lot of trouble with your marketing.

Tim Fitzpatrick: Yeah, dude, that's a fantastic piece of advice because so many times we think we're communicating something and what the other person's hearing is totally different.

Michael Roderick: Exactly.

Tim Fitzpatrick: So do you do that just randomly throughout conversations? How do you practice that?

Michael Roderick: Yeah. If I'm having a conversation with somebody and there's something that I'm testing out, I'll basically share it and I'll just say, I'm going to share something with you. And what I'd love for you to do, if you're open to it, I would love for you to just tell me in your own words what you heard. I would just love to... Is that okay? They're either going to say yes or no. And if they say yes, then they come back and they tell me what they heard. And then I'm able to figure out, Okay, well, this is what they're hearing. This is what's coming up as the offer, as the idea. When I do in my Mastermind, Hitmakers, that's one of the exercises that we'll do is we'll basically be like, Okay, present this concept, and then everybody else in the room in the Mastermind, tell us what you heard. Because, then it's like, Oh, okay. This is the pattern that we're seeing. And patterns are the precursors to frameworks. You build frameworks because you see patterns and you basically allow those patterns to come together to be like, Okay, this is a concept. This is an idea. But you can't see patterns without data. You can't see patterns unless people are giving you lots of feedback and you're seeing the same answer over and over and over again. I'm always looking for those patterns, and that's what helps with the building of the frameworks.

Tim Fitzpatrick: Michael, this has been awesome. Where can people learn more about you? You got a tool for them here.

Michael Roderick: If they go to myreferabilityrater.com, you can basically just take a test that will give you an idea of how referable you are. It goes through a bunch of accessibility, influence, and memory questions, and you'll get a score and it'll let you know where you are on the journey. And then I write a daily email, but you'll get the option to subscribe to either my daily or my weekly email. And I share all these concepts. And every week I share the top one from the daily every week. So you get the option of which batch of information you want once you go through the Referability Rater process.

Tim Fitzpatrick: Awesome, man. Thank you so much. Guys, Michael Roderick, Small Pond Enterprises. Go check out myreferabilityrater.com. I will make sure that those are in the show notes. Michael, honestly, I'm just going to tell you, man, you have one of the tightest presentations, talks that I've ever been through.

Michael Roderick: Oh, wow.

Tim Fitzpatrick: You guys, seriously, you should go through this again because Michael's got this completely dialed in. Michael, thank you, man. I appreciate it. For those of you that are watching, listening, I appreciate you doing so. We've spent all this time today on how to be referable, which to me falls in this category of retention and referrals, which is one of the nine revenue roadblocks we help people remove so they can accelerate growth. If you want to find out which roadblocks are slowing down your growth, go to?revenueroadblockscorecard.com. You can always connect with us over at rialtomarketing.com as well. Thank you again. Until next time, take care.

Connect With Michael Roderick

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Links From The Episode

• The Referability Rater!
• Small Pond Enterprise

About the author,?Tim Fitzpatrick

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