Brian Buffini argues that a business database should be actual relationships, not a mailing list. He cites data showing roughly 7 closed transactions come from 100 people you actively maintain contact with, and recommends focusing on upstream partners like attorneys and lenders who send qualified business instead of chasing cold leads.
Questions this video answers
About 7 closed transactions per 100 people (approximately a 7% yield).
A database is defined by Brian Buffini, which I love this definition. It's not a mailing list. It's definitely not just a list of cold leads. It's a list of relationships. In other words, if you were to pick up the phone and call them, you know who you're calling, number one, and they know who's calling them. Right. So 100 of those people in any given year, 10 of them. Now, that book was written decades ago. It's been updated that in our noisy world, it's probably closer to seven. So you can count on about seven pieces of closed business from 100 people that you're keeping track of. Right. You're in contact with them. So then if you think to yourself, okay, I really want to work now, again, that's using your sphere, the number is much larger. If you're doing cold market, right, because the relationship isn't in place, then you have to ask yourself, okay, if I want to, let's say, add another 10 transactions this next year, I need to add what, 112. I don't know the exact math, but it's over 100 people to your database using the 7% number, that's like, wow, 100 people. Now, let me just reference back to what I said before. I think we can all see when maybe we don't have deep relationships with our spouse or with our kids. Why not? Well, maybe it's because we're trying to have relationships with 100 new people every year in order to create the business, to help put them through college, et cetera. And yet we put kids through college we don't have relationships with. There's a problem there. Right. So that's kind of how the traditional model has taught us. Again, it's a numbers game. Go into it, just add lots of people, and from those lots of people, you'll find a golden egg. You'll find seven golden eggs. Right. So I don't know if you're ready for me to kind of transition into the upstream model and kind of tell you what that. Yeah, for sure. So. So the counter to that, which, again, anybody that's doing something that works, don't give it all up and say, well, I'm going to do this now. No, that's not a recipe for success. But I would say whatever you're doing, keep doing it. But I would encourage you strongly to start to think about potentially right away and over time having this strategy that I'm going to lay out to you. Eclipse the older traditional models or at least have a large like a lion's share of your attention. And that's this. That instead of chasing golden eggs, there are golden geese in the marketplace. Okay? Now, this may come in the form of estate attorneys, lenders, builders, developers, CPAs, financial advisors, divorce attorneys. Right? We've all heard this, right? This isn't some new concept. But I'm going to get to the new concept here in just a second. But rather than, again, going out and trying to court all these people, go find the people that can actually help you. Those upstream partners then become an extremely valuable, what I call not just a center of influence, but a sender of influence.
