What would your Clients say if you asked for a Referral?

 

 

The only way to earn referrals is to first earn a client’s trust, reduce their perceived risk and provide a fantastic service. So what can you do to achieve this?

1. Find something extra that you can do for them, beyond what they were expecting: some extra work, outside the scope of your agreement, provided with ‘your compliments’.Give referrals to your clients and show them where they might be able to get new business. If you do this in a way that makes it clear you don’t expect anything in return, it will make you look even better.
2. Give referrals to your clients and show them where they might be able to get new business. If you do this in a way that makes it clear you don’t expect anything in return, it will make you look even better.
3. Be friendly with your clients. An informal lunch now and then will make them feel more comfortable about putting you in touch with one of their connections. Remember the marketing cliché (truth): people buy from people they like!

Asking your clients some questions like the following can lead down the referral path too:

• What could we be doing better?
• What have we done right so far?
• How satisfied are you with our services?

Listen very carefully to what they say. If their answers indicate that enough trust has been gained, it’s fair to expect some referrals. When this is the case you could half-jokingly ask, “So who are you thinking of referring to us?” There’s a good chance the client might smile and give you a name or two.

Why not do a mail shot or some other one-off promotion? Isn’t that less effort than asking for referrals like this?

One-off marketing promotions can be effective, and it’s where most B2B companies are spending their scarce marketing dollars. But don’t do a big marketing promotion before you have a customer reactivation program—it is always cheaper to reactivate existing customers than getting new ones.

So running new promotions is good, but only if you have a Referral Program already in place. 

Referrals are the best new customers. FACT!

Click here for the full story on Referrals.

Cheers, Toby.    [B105]

Toby is the founder of the B2B marketing company: Lead Creation Written by

Toby MarshallGetting your Prospects talking back | Clear strategies for B2B Marketing, powerful case studies and guaranteed results.

4 Gems to close a sale

Image credit: Toni Verdú Carbó | Flickr

CHRIS MACOMBER

CEO of WhoKnows

https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/239855

In the sales process, letting too much time elapse can be a real deal killer. Once you connect with a prospect, follow up with the right information.

Closing deals is still largely about referrals, knowing where to go and the best people to contact. Social-networking sites do make the job of finding referrals easier, letting a businessperson's social graph play an important role in suggestions and deals.

Keep these tips in mind when using your social graph for collaborative selling: 

Related: A New Model for Results-Driven Networking

1. Determine which person is the best connection.

Since people have so many connections, it’s sometimes difficult to determine the most relevant and important ones. Knowing the strength or quality of a relationship can help you score more meaningful introductions and hopefully more collaborative sales

2. Know that the best contact may be beside you. 

Most companies have databases of their employees’ skills and expertise and staffers have long lists of professional and social relationships. 

Thus you might not even need to consult a social networking platform to learn that a colleague the next cubicle over used to work with a decision maker at the company that's a sales prospect.

3. Figure out who knows what on the home team.

Many sales opportunities require a team approach due to their complexity. This is common for bidding processes requiring a request for proposal or request for information.

Knowing which of your fellow employees has specialized knowledge to address questions in a bid can mean the difference between winning and losing a contract. If people within your company possess critical knowledge, make it possible for the sales team to quickly identify who they are.

4. Use the right tools. 

Using the right discovery engine can be a powerful tool in helping you better curate and catalog the people you know. Collaborative software tools help companies evaluate “who knows whom” and “who knows what” and understand the full scope of the workforce's capabilities. 

If used correctly, collaboration can be a real deal maker. And at the end of the day, that's what successful selling is all about. 

Be sure to be a part of the BBG community (www.bbg.business) and download the app Referron, that will enable you to easily refer (within 3 taps) and track measure and reward referrals within 3 taps! (Www.referron.com )