Referrals

Your Clear-Cut How-To Guide to Getting Referrals

Referrals are valued by businesses, for two main reasons:

  1. The cost of your sales process is reduced
  2. The relationship starts with a level of trust, with your small business “well positioned”

To obtain anything of value (such as referrals), there are three golden rules. You need to:

  1. Have a plan
  2. Ask for what you want
  3. Make it easy for people to help you get it

 

Referrals from Existing Clients – Just Ask!

You have been doing everything right. Your client is happy. Their needs are being met — so what’s going on, why aren’t they referring you?

Firstly, keep in mind that you are dealing with very busy (and most likely self-absorbed) people and companies. It comes as no surprise, then, that your wants and needs are the least of their concerns. You need to take the initiative and ask them. Success does not come easily – don’t be afraid of rejection or that they don’t follow through, it happens. Pick yourself up and move along to the next—persevere.

People will often talk positively about their service providers, but they won’t be inclined to refer them unless they are asked. As a last resort, however, you may want to try enticing clients with incentives. Everybody loves incentives. Whether it be discounts, free upgrades and services or even a small thank you gift. But not something so valuable that it will be seen as a bribe, so usually give more of your product. A plasma TV will rightly be seen as a bribe, not an incentive.

If you’re finding you are not getting anywhere, you may need to revaluate your position. Have you earned the right to ask for a referral in the first place? Is your service worth it?

 

Make it Easy for your Clients

What is always the key ingredient for establishing and maintaining a healthy relationship with other people? The answer is always better communication.

One way to communicate is to make sure your clients get the inside scoop via regular newsletters–– it’s easy and cost effective. The content of these newsletters should educate clients about new goods and services or simply the latest news. They should also have some personal news and even contain some fun or humour.

Regular newsletters will benefit you by implicitly reminding your existing clients about your business and what it can bring to the table. In the long run, it will also make it easier for them to publicise your business. A brief statement about your business objectives, goods and services as well as benefits is another great promotional tool. Even just a few key words to summarise your position will come in handy. You may even want to create a detailed brochure or write a witty, yet informing article. Lastly, if you do not have a website––create one. If you have a website, update it regularly and refer your clients to it.

Now, although this is all important, let’s reverse this ‘me, me, me’ mentality for a moment and turn our focus to the clients. What do you know about them? It is important to keep an up-to-date database about your clients and potential clients. By following this two way interaction model, you will create and generate referrals.

 

The Big Tip…

Ask for a referral immediately that you are awarded the contract or the order. The following way of asking has nearly a 100% success rate:

Thanks for the contract; we are looking forward to (‘doing a great job’) for you. When as expected we have delivered and you are happy with the results, we would then really appreciate two things from you.

Firstly, a testimonial about our work, and secondly we’d like to ask for the names of others you know who might also benefit from our service.

So, you are getting permission and also creating a slight obligation to do what they agreed to when you later ask for these two small but extremely valuable favors.

When you have completed the work and are doing your “post project feedback” session, ideally face to face, is the best time to ask. It’s also helpful to ensure you have allowed enough time as it can take a while for them to think of some referrals.

Now you need to make it easy for them – you need to be very clear about the clients you are seeking more of. How you describe them must be succinct, meaningful and actionable by your client.

To illustrate, at our business lead creation, we say:

The clients we can most help are small businesses in Professional Services or Business to Business sales who provide a great service but not enough people know about what they offer and the value they provide – so they need to raise their profile both online and offline. They typically have less than 100 staff and could be as small as just the owner. And most importantly, many don’t have a lot of spare cash at the moment so our low fees are well regarded.

Then we give them prompts to help them – you can even show them a list. lead creation, has the following types of organisations on our list:

 

  • Financial Planners
  • Accountants
  • Lawyers
  • Engineering Consultants
  • Stock Brokers
  • Project Managers
  • Strategic Consultants
  • HR Consultants
  • Recruitment Firms
  • Business Coaches
  • Executive Coaches
  • Life Coaches
  • Training Companies
  • Architects
  • Non-Executive Directors
  • Quantity Surveyors
  • Marketing and Branding Consultants
  • IT Companies
  • IT Support

 

Then you can ask a couple of prompting questions to dig out referrals, questions which will of course vary by business. For example:

 

  • What about the people who supply your business?
  • People you know from your Golf club/children’s schools/etc?

 

If they are too busy right now or can’t think of anyone, say something like, “Why don’t I leave the list with you and give you a call next week”. And ideally, you need to send them something between now and then (a free report, or a press article of interest) without reminding them of the referrals—the subtle, ‘not so pushy’ approach is best.

Worth all the effort? Absolutely. But really, it’s not much of an effort if you remember to ask up front.

 

Referrals from Non-Clients

Let’s look at getting referrals from people who are not clients. Follow a similar process to what we outlined above, which is to ask for it but always in a structured way. With non-clients there is also a case for using an incentive to encourage people to make an effort.

What we have found effective in our small business, lead creation is to offer three alternatives:

  1.  A thousand dollars (5% to 10% of the price of our full marketing system with all 9 modules implemented)
  2.  A thousand dollars to a charity or association of their choice
  3. For example, to choose from one of:
  1.  
    1. To build a new, interactive website with a CMS
    2. Get them on page one of Google search results
    3. Set up their PR strategy to run in-house plus get one or two media articles published
    4. Set up a Google AdWords campaign

Referrals are the best source of new business. To increase the amount you get, you need to focus on the process you follow—and in particular, to ask for them.

One-off marketing promotions can be effective, and are what most small business marketing consists of. But don’t do a big marketing promotion before you have a customer reactivation program – it is always cheaper to reactivate existing customers than it is to get new ones. So running new promotions is good but not if you don’t have a Referral Program in place – referrals are the best new customers.