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.

Gone is the dialing for dollars mentality. You can do better than that.

You can use these tools to do everything from identifying who your best-odds prospects are to deducing why they’d want to speak with you, writing a powerful email, and ultimately attracting them to you. Here are some of my favorites.

1.    Identify the who. Once you know the profile of the types of contacts and companies you want to approach, use Zoominfo.com, NetProspex.com, Insideview.com or Hoovers.com to search and get the names of the best contacts to talk to.

2.    Delve in. Go a step further and do some research for the contacts you’ve uncovered on those same sites. What have they written? Where have they been quoted? You can quickly get a feel for what’s top of mind with them and where their passions lie. Use this information to craft your grabber value proposition for phone calls and emails. Use it to write blogs or articles that’ll attract their attention and peak their interest. Comment about your ideas on social networks.

3.    Secure contact info. Start with these same sites to find the most current contact information for your target prospects. Jigsaw and NetProspex are maintained by people like you and me, so they’ve often got very current information. While you’re there, add a few contacts of your own and earn points for free contact information downloads. You can also use LinkedIn, Facebook and other social networks as a tool.

4.    Find elusive email addresses.  If you still can’t find an email address here’s a trick to try. From your search engine type “@their website domain” and it’ll pull up anywhere on the web where email addresses for that domain appear. Now you’ll have the email protocol for that company and can more effectively guess your contact’s email address.

5.    Watch your prospects. No, we aren’t talking stalking. Watch what your top prospects are doing using alert services like Google Alerts for free. Set up a daily alert and see all the tweets and comments they’ve made and where they’re mentioned. You’ll know what to talk about when you call and more importantly, when they need you to call.

6.    Make your emails stand out. Use Gobbledygook.grader.com to pick out trite or hype-filled words and phrases you don’t even know you’re using. It’s a great tool to increase the impact of your brochures and online copy, too.

7.    Know if they’re listening. One of the biggest challenges with email prospecting is knowing if anyone has read what you sent. Use ReadNotify.com to trace email opens and forwards, numbers of times read, and URL clicks. Use Bit.ly to shorten long links for social network comments and emails. You can track how many times the links are opened, forwarded and by whom.

8.    Increase your own productivity. If you’re a Microsoft Outlook user Xobni.com is a plugin that makes searching your inbox and finding information about your contacts fast and easy. You can even search social networks for information about your contacts.

Getting people to reply is the most difficult aspect of prospecting. These tools give you new levels of information and insight to increase your odds of 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 subscribe to her newsletter visit www.klagroup.com or call +1 303.773.1285.

The prospects who attend feel as if they know you and want your assistance.

With today’s technology, events are inexpensive to run.  But if you’re going to do all the work to create great content with high value, you want to be sure that the people who are interested in it know it’s happening and how to sign up.

You won’t get the number of qualified leads you deserve if only 5 people attend! Here’s where social media can help.

Now I know what you’re thinking. I’ve been there, too. “Social media can’t possibly help me. I don’t have much time for it, don’t do it regularly, and am not connected to that many people.”

So what?

I ran an event just last month that had people I’d never heard of before in attendance. They found it from re-tweets of my tweets, comments others had commented on, and our postings across LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter. These people weren’t connected to me anywhere. Social networking made it happen.

How? Let me share my strategies with you.

1.    Post the event details on your website – This is your opportunity to say as much as you’d like about the event, including every fact. Point all your comments back to your website for additional information and registration. Not only do interested readers learn more about the event, now they’re in your website, too.
2.    Comment and tweet – This goes without saying, but here are a few extras to ponder. People tend to prefer one social network over the others, but no target markets as a whole typically favor one over another. Given this, you want to be sure you talk up your event on every one you use. Comment about it in your LinkedIn status. Discuss it on Facebook. Tweet about it. Carry your comments over the course of days and weeks preceding the event, right up to minutes before it begins.
3.    Post everywhere – Lots of people don’t realize that you can post events to LinkedIn and Facebook in special “Event” sections. Once you do, people connected to you are notified, and others outside your group see them when they use key word searches. Your network can forward the link on to others in their groups who might be interested, too.
4.    Use links – as you comment and post, include links to the details on your website. Keep the postings brief and quick to scan. If you’ve hit someone’s hot button, they’ll click through to learn more and sign up. Use a tool like www.bit.ly or www.tinyurl.com to shorten long links.
5.    Sign-up on LinkedIn – as people from your target segments enroll, shoot them a quick email and ask them to click in LinkedIn that they’re attending. Send them the direct LinkedIn event link to make it simple. Now all their connections see that they’re attending, expanding your message within your target market.
6.    Leverage your network – ask your top clients and peer network to comment and tweet about the event. Give them brief phrases they can simply copy and paste. Have them note on LinkedIn that they’re interested in attending the event. Your message will reach out into their contacts, further extending your reach even though they aren’t attending.

Once your content is perfected, events are a numbers game. The more interested people from your target market that you can attract to your event, the greater the number of leads. Social networking can get your message out, bringing participants and leads to you!

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.

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.