You can enlist everyone in your organization who works with your clients to ask for referrals. There are only two things that hold them back today:

1.    Awareness of how important it is
2.    Fear of rejection

Creating a referral gathering process can address both. To set up your process consider the following.

Create a profile of who to ask. Asking for referrals can be scary. It’s another opportunity for rejection. Perhaps your client isn’t as happy as you thought or may not want to disclose names. With this in mind, you want to be sure you’re asking people with whom you have the best potential for success. Create a profile of the characteristics of the ideal client to ask, such as they appreciate your recommendations on how to use IT more effectively across their business. This helps everyone on your team envision who they’re asking.

Identify four perfect points to ask. Knowing who to ask is only one piece of successful referral gathering. There are points in your sales and account management process that are natural opportunities to ask for referrals. Clients are happy. Discussions are valuable. They’ll be more than willing to recommend people for you to speak with. Determine which four are your best and integrate them into your processes.

Create additional natural opportunities for asking. Clearly you don’t want to ask for referrals every time you see a client or prospect. For most people that’s uncomfortable. If you want to extend beyond the four points in your sales and account management process, create some other genuine circumstances to ask, such as quarterly business reviews or project close-out meetings.

Provide the words to use to ask, then train people to use them. Teach your team how to frame their referral request, including how to transition from the topic at hand to the question. It doesn’t need to be a half-day training. Use an hour at a company meeting or your Monday morning meeting. The goal is to make people comfortable with asking for referrals. The quickest way to do that is to practice together.

Measure referrals. Not only will this validate that your process is working, it’ll show your team the impact they’re having on growing the business. Create a lead source code in your CRM and you’ll be able to measure sales results from referrals and even the lifetime value of referrals.

Once you take a proactive approach and make referral gathering part of your sales and account management process your team will get comfortable asking and you’ll have a steady flow of warm prospects. Combine this with your Referral Rewards Program and you have a referral strategy for success!

Kendra Lee is a top IT Seller, Prospect Attraction Expert and author of the award winning book “Selling Against the Goal” and president of KLA Group. Specializing in the IT industry, KLA Group works with companies to break in and exceed revenue objectives in the Small and Midmarket Business (SMB) segment. Ms. Lee is a frequent speaker at national sales meetings and association events. To find out more about the author, read her latest articles, or to subscribe to her newsletter visit www.klagroup.com or call +1 303.773.1285.

Traditional transactional marketing involved the organisation focusing all of its marketing efforts on attracting the customer for one off sales. However, customers who are loyal end up spending more in the long-term, so it makes sense to keep existing customers happy.

Attracting and retaining customers

Relationship marketing involves the organisation undertaking a number of important activities. First of all, the company must put into place tactics to attract customers. Methods used to attract customers may include promoting the product and brand, offering good quality products/services and competitive prices. Secondly customers that are attracted to the organisation have to be retained.

After all, what’s the point of all the hard work (and money) of attracting customers if you can’t retain them? Methods used to retain, may include, loyalty cards, a good customer service section, and an individual account manager if it is a large client, along with product variety and quality.

Methods of monitoring customer satisfaction

An organisation must continue to satisfy customers, but let’s be honest; it is very difficult to keep 100% of your customers satisfied all the time, one reason is because needs and wants of your customers change. So we have to monitor what is happening in our customer environment.

Methods used to monitor customer satisfaction may include:

• Focus groups
• General comments
• Online surveys
• Suggestion boxes
• Customer complaints
• Mystery Shoppers
• Questionnaires
• Personal interviews

In order to retain customers you must keep up to date with the needs of your customers.

Your customers needs don’t remain static either, they’re always changing. Adapting and changing along with these needs will help your organisation develop the relationship you want with your customers.

The benefits:

1. Increased profits
2. Increased market share
3. Increased brand awarenes

The more you focus on customers – their needs and desires – the more they’ll want to do business with you. Contact us to discuss some of the great cost-effective startegies we can introduce to grow your business.

Knowing this, more and more sellers are asking for referrals as a primary approach to filling their pipelines.

But they aren’t getting the number of high quality referrals they’d like or need. The techniques we’re hearing aren’t working consistently. That’s because so often we leave it up to the client to guess who they should refer us to. If you really want to be successful building your pipeline with referrals, you need to take a step back and think about what types of introductions you really want.

Just any old referral won’t get you your next hot prospect. When you leave it up to your customer to figure out who they think would be a good referral, they won’t consider all the qualification points you do.

They might not recognize that they’re a great client because they’re:

• Focused on issues that fall within your offerings’ sweet spot
• Using your solutions exactly like you want other customers to
• In a specific industry or a certain size company
• Treating you as a trusted advisor

Suddenly you find yourself with a referral that’s less than ideal. It’s too small a company, has a completely different set of needs than you address, or is outside your industry expertise.
Because the referral came from one of your top clients, you either have to figure out how to say “thanks, but no thanks” or follow-up then explain to your customer why it wasn’t the best fit. It’s possible you could actually waste as much time following up on this unqualified introduction as you would cold calling!

A poor referral from a great client puts you in an awkward position – all because you were trying to shorten your new business development cycle through referrals. Mediocre connections won’t help you fill your pipeline.

No, you only want top quality referrals. Your desire is to get introduced to companies and contacts that really need your offerings and will want to talk with you. You’re looking for new connections with the characteristics of your best clients.

Don’t limit yourself to asking for referrals that are similar in size, industry, or region.
Broaden your expectations to seek introductions to people who’ll implement and appreciate your offerings like your best clients do. Ask for contacts who’ll want to work closely with you and welcome your expertise and recommendations.

To get referrals that fit such specific qualifications, you need to frame who is a great connection when you ask. Tell your customer what types of companies make the best match for your offerings.

There are two parts to framing your referral request:

• Say, “someone like you who…” – and fill in the blank with the profile of your ideal referral.
• Then add, “someone who needs …” – and include the classic challenges, issues or needs you address.

What you’re doing is creating a picture of your ideal referral for your client. Now as they mentally search through all their colleagues, they can easily determine which ones to recommend. You’ve taken the guesswork out of it.

Call me a referral snob if you will, but if we’re going to ask for referrals, spend precious time following up on them, and then work them with due diligence, don’t we deserve to get only the very best introductions? I sure think so!

Kendra Lee is a top IT Seller, Prospect Attraction Expert and author of the award winning book “Selling Against the Goal” and president of KLA Group. Specializing in the IT industry, KLA Group works with companies to break in and exceed revenue objectives in the Small and Midmarket Business (SMB) segment.

.
My first ever recollection of Referral Marketing was in 1958, though it wasn’t called that then.

It was my first visit to the cinema and I was five years old. Although I didn’t really appreciate the story or exactly what was going on, it was loud and exciting and it stuck with me for over 50-years. What I do know though, was that just about everyone in my playground the following day also knew just how exciting it was and I bet the Odeon in Croydon did pretty well out of me for a few days after and so did MGM too.

Over the past 50 years I must have recommended literally hundreds of films, books, shops, products, services and god knows what else. But I’m not alone because everyone has their own stories about things they’ve recommended to others; it’s what makes the world go around after all.

There lies the whole point; “Word Of Mouth” or “Referral” Marketing is something you and your customers are already doing every day of your lives and with the correct structure and strategy it can become the most powerful generator of customers for your business since the day you started and you were telling all your friends about it.

It can become automatic and your customers can be incentivised to expand it to the point where your customers always think of your business first when they recommend products and services.

To find out how this can work better for your business and put your products and services ahead of your competition, email us.

My thanks to LisaNova does Youtube for the ‘Word of Mouth’ video.

So just what is referral marketing and how can to promote your business in front of everyone else’s?

It’s basically a systemised approach that turns every single sale into the buying power of many. This is done by establishing a specific set of strategies and tools designed to bring you new customers, clients, leads, and repeat business without other advertising methods. However, when combined with other systems such as advertising and direct mail, you will have a very powerful system of customer generation.

There are usually two things that stop small businesses from working referral marketing consistently and powerfully:

1. Lack of system
2. Fear of rejection

If you provide a product or service that helps solve problems and meets the needs of your customers or clients then surely you owe it to others to spread the word.

If you think about the act of referring it really comes down to these two simple things:

1. Provide a product or service that is liked and needed
2. Administering the referral expectation

If you’re not already convinced you should be actively employing referral marketing then here’s why you need to do this:

• Referrals are credible right from the start. When a trusted friend or colleague tells you about a business you transfer that trust to this company…even if you’ve never heard of them before.

• Research has proven beyond the shadow of a doubt that people who are referred to a business tend to spend more money. It’s probably because people tend to refer those that are ready-to-buy and not merely price shoppers.

• Referrals are extremely cost-effective and even a fraction of what you might pay in advertising costs in some cases.

Referrals are essential to your business so don’t overlook them.

To get your referral system in place and multiply your customer base contact us today.