Persistent and Consistent Prospecting

The first step in creating familiarity is through persistent and consistent daily prospecting. Each time you call, e-mail, send a text message, engage face to face, hand out a business card or brochure, leave a voice mail, or connect on social media, you create familiarity.

This is one of the core reasons why persistence pays off. The more times people see or hear your name, the more familiar you become to them and the people who influence and protect them. Simply put, the more you prospect, the more familiar you get.

Referrals and Introductions

The most powerful and direct path to familiarity is a referral or introduction. The referral gives you instant credibility because you get to ride in on the coattails of a person who is already trusted by your prospect. There are three basic types of referrals:

1. Referrals that come from recruits you have already enlisted. The key to generating these referrals is developing a disciplined, systematic process for staying in touch with the people you have enlisted, teaching them what you are looking for, and asking for referrals.
2. Referrals that come from prospects and applicants. When you are engaging prospects and applicants—whether qualified or not—you should always be asking for referrals.
3. Referrals that come from relationships you’ve developed with educators, administrators, and people in your community. To generate these referrals, you must seek out and make an ongoing investment in professional relationships. The wider your professional network, the more referrals you’ll generate. The RISS is a key tool for managing these relationships.

The real secret to generating referrals is:

• Step 1: Invest in relationships
• Step 2: Ask

That’s it. Straightforward and simple. Yet, while standing in front of a group of recruiters last month, I asked:

“How many of you asked for at least one referral last week?”

No hands went up.

“How about in the last month?”

One hand.

“How about in the last quarter?”

Three hands.

Shocking? Not really. I ask this question to groups of recruiters regularly. The response is almost always the same.

Yet referrals are your easiest enlistments. They are more likely to engage, more likely to be qualified, and less likely to hit you with objections. Developing a consistent stream of referrals makes mission far more attainable.

I’m not going to waste your time discussing why recruiters don’t ask, because that answer is more than obvious: They either fear getting turned down (rejection) or they have not developed the intentional habit of asking everyone they meet for referrals.

This brings us back to the most important discipline in recruiting—asking. The key to getting referrals is the discipline to ask, and the more times you ask, the more referrals you will get.

School Activities

The heart of military recruiting is the high school. This is where familiarity is born. This is where relationships are conceived. Success in the grad market is critically dependent on the relationships you build with students while they are still in high school. So you’ve got to be cool to your schools.

But you must go! Can I make this any clearer? Go to your schools. Go shake hands. Go meet people. Go learn about them. Go get involved. Go seek out opportunities to help.

Involvement allows you to engage students on a different level. Most schools are running on thin budgets. They need help. If you volunteer, they’ll allow you to help coach sports, or be a substitute teacher, or help with graduation and other activities. Many recruiters become such an integral part of their schools that students and teachers think they work there. It’s a powerful position to be in as a recruiter.

Events and Networking

Nothing breeds familiarity better than face-to-face contact. Social media prospecting is important, but events and face-to-face networking are the real social recruiting.

Whether it’s playing pickup basketball, volunteering in your schools and communities, going to sporting events, attending local community events—there are endless opportunities to network in your community and school.

Events help you create connections with prospects and make it much easier to qualify them with greater transparency. You create connections when you ask questions, listen, and become genuinely interested in other people. Maya Angelou said, “People will forget what you said or did, but they will always remember how you made them feel.” Take this to heart as you invest time in networking and events and refrain from being a walking, talking marketing brochure.

Following up after events is the key to anchoring new relationships and familiarity. Use handwritten notes to remind the other person of your conversation by referencing something you spoke about. Keep a stack of stamped envelopes and thank-you notes in your car. Write notes while the conversations are still fresh.

After a positive conversation, send a short text to thank the person for taking time to speak with you. Follow that up with a social media connection request to further anchor familiarity.

Finally, log any leads into your Recruiting Information Support System no later than the next morning. If you promised to send something, schedule an appointment, or introduce them to someone else, schedule a task and take action within 24 hours of the event.

Then follow up on a regular basis until you move these prospects into the pipeline.

Personal Branding and Marketing

Familiarity is also built through personal branding—making a direct investment in improving the awareness of your name, face, and reputation. This is the ultimate way to build familiarity because people enlist with you first, then the military.

The military marketing machine is always at work, driving brand recognition and generating leads through traditional advertising, social media, and content marketing. But you have a role to play as well. You must actively participate in getting the word out about you and career opportunities within your branch.

Never in the human experience has it been easier to build familiarity through personal branding. Today, distributing content is easy. Just jump on your favorite social network and go to town. Point, shoot, write, click, and publish—it’s all at your fingertips. You can get your name out there and build your reputation fast.

There is, however, a personal branding methodology that is so little used that I consider it a secret weapon in the war for familiarity. It has an extraordinary track record for producing results and creates instant familiarity, credibility, and leads.

The secret: Speak in public, regularly.

Public speaking is a powerful method for meeting people and developing relationships because it creates a situation where prospects seek you out.

When you speak in public, at least for a moment, you are considered a minor celebrity who people want to meet. After you give your speech, people walk up to you, engage you in conversations, open up freely, and voluntarily hand over their contact information.

You can easily get speaking gigs. Organizations like the chamber of commerce, Rotary Club, trade organizations, schools, colleges, and other civic groups are always in need of guest speakers. All you really have to do is call and volunteer and they will happily put you on the schedule.

Speaking allows you to tell your personal story and showcase your knowledge and experience in the military. It gives you tremendous visibility and credibility. It sets you apart, enhances your personal brand, and creates a greater sense of familiarity with your prospects.

Remember, though, like everything in recruiting, building familiarity is about balance. You must balance the need for enlistments today with an investment in the future.