Referral selling

Referring new customers can grow your business faster and better. If you don't take advantage of referral selling, you'll lose 25% of your potential business. The top sales technique for winning new business is not using salespeople. The best way is to recommend potential customers to you through your existing customers.

The reasons why the recommendation method is so valuable are:

1. Potential customers are recommended by people you know. In this way, you shorten the process of getting to know your prospects, and by building a common ground based on friendship, acquaintance, and business relationships, you can also help ease the stress of the initial contact phase of the sales process.

2. Recommend methods to expand business network. You can expand your relationship circle with each recommended potential customer, and then use this relationship network to increase existing business and win new business.

3. Recommended methods reduce sales costs. By asking for referrals and following up with leads, you not only save time but also reduce costs. It costs 6 times more to market to a completely new target than to market to a referred potential customer. Just think about it, it's expensive to add salespeople to sell, but it's not expensive to use the customers you already have to recommend new customers.

4. The recommended potential customers bring added value to the recommender. When you follow up with the referred potential customer, win the business, and make him happy, the value of the referrer is also increased. The referrer's credibility increases and he or she is often thanked by the new customer.

5. Recommended methods help utilize your best sales force. Happy customers make up your strongest sales force, and their word of mouth is the single most effective form of advertising. You will often be asked to provide evidence of the trustworthiness of your product or service, and testimonials from your existing customers can bring immediate credibility and rarely require additional information.

Trust is the Solid Foundation for Buying Decisions. In a typical sales situation, trust is the top question on the prospect's mind. He asks himself, "How do I know I can trust this person and this company?" "You work hard; you sacrifice a lot to make your printed materials fit and look good; you also show potential customers proof of product fit, ask good questions, and listen carefully to the answers; all in an effort to gain trust. .

Brian Tracy, one of the world's leading sales training professionals, believes that building trust is the critical first step in the sales process. He said that the work of building trust with customers accounts for 40% of the entire sales process, and the other work is to reveal customers' needs and provide solutions to problems. In this sense, the value of the recommendation method is simple: there is already a trust relationship between you and the existing customers, and between the existing customers and the recommended potential customers. The recommendation process quickly establishes a certain degree of trust between you and the recommended potential customers, which is a powerful advantage for initiating sales.

Main Types of Referrals

We often see many help-wanted advertisements for professional salespeople, and they all guarantee that there will be absolutely no sales calls for strangers. In fact, companies can make this guarantee even more explicit by teaching salespeople how to generate referral leads from family, friends, and business associates. This way, salespeople can ask for referrals to new customers as part of their conversation with each existing customer and potential customer.

So, from which channels can we get the best customer recommendations? The following channels are worth trying:

1. Most of the recommendations from customers come from satisfied existing customers, so the recommendations from existing customers are obvious. Salespeople cannot frequently request referrals from long-term clients or customers on a regular basis (such as monthly). When customers like you enough to continue doing business with you, chances are they will be able and willing to continue recommending new business to you. When these customers recommend to potential customers how much they themselves have benefited from you, then the potential customer will also be strongly inclined to do business with you.

2. Big Friends Your circle of friends can be a huge source of new business recommendations. So it's important that your close friends understand your business and what value it brings to your existing customers. When friends also understand what your ideal customer or client is, they are better able to find and recommend the right potential customers for you.

3. The fact that our competitors have a large number of customers is often overlooked, but those who are not currently doing business with us can often recommend some very valuable potential customers.

4. Suppliers maintain a solid relationship with suppliers, which can bring a lot of recommended business, especially when the supplier and our customers are the same type of enterprise, but the services provided by both This is especially true when there is no correlation at all.

5. Large family members Many of us who have vowed not to mix business and family are unwilling to recommend business through family members.

However, those who have benefited greatly from referrals from family members know all too well the value of politely asking for referrals and following up immediately.

Key links

As mentioned earlier, people we know - whether in business relationships or outside business relationships, can recommend valuable potential customers to us. . However, these people can’t spend all day sourcing the names and phone numbers of qualified leads for us. So how do we get this information? We need to ask for this information! Too simple? Indeed, but how to ask for it?

How to ask for recommended business is a key part of the sales process. Let’s look at this approach: “Do you know someone who could benefit from our services?” We limit the choices of “know” and “don’t know” to the recommender, which gives the recommender a 50% chance of answering “ Don’t know”.

In order to increase our chances of success, first of all, we need to help recommenders start to straighten out their ideas from their own perspective; secondly, we need to move from the choice of "yes/no" to "yes/ Yes" option comes up. Compare this to a more specific approach: "What businesses in your office could benefit from our services?" Or: "Who in your neighborhood would benefit from the specialized services you have chosen?" By more By asking specific questions, we can not only help the recommender focus on a certain aspect, but also improve our chances of getting one or two names of recommended potential customers.

To communicate with satisfied customers, try this: "A lot of our new business comes from people like you doing business with us. Who are your friends who could benefit from this?" This can reinforce the message. The value we bring to existing customers and opens the door to opportunities for non-competitors to refer new business. This approach is particularly valuable in situations where customers/clients see working with us as a competitive advantage.

Business Contact

The key factors in recommending business follow-up are timely contact and the first business contact method. Prompt contact is important. The referrer will often notify the referral that he or she has given us his or her name, and the later we wait to follow up, the more the opportunity will fade. If we follow up too late, it could be interpreted as a sign that we don't care about the new business opportunity or that we're unorganized, both of which hurt our chances of working with the referred prospect. First impressions last a long time, so we need to follow up quickly and professionally to make the most of referral business opportunities.

Equally important as timely follow-up is the method of initial business contact. We often cannot determine the extent of the relationship between the recommender and the recommendee. To remedy this information gap, we need to make our approach to first business contact as effective as possible.

Without any planning or forethought, we may say: "Joe Jones said I should call you." This will burden the referred potential customer and think that you are a detective. he. In fact, the prospect may ask some questions to start the conversation, and the conversation may be exactly the opposite of what we hoped for.

Try this: "Joe Jones asked me to call you, and I promised him I would." Today, anyone who keeps their word will be well regarded. Therefore, through this method, we create a positive atmosphere for starting a conversation with potential customers. This allows us to jump straight into the meeting, ask the prospect good questions, and understand his situation and needs.

Finally, there are some specific tips for winning more referral business. These techniques include: treating everyone you meet as a potential referrer of new business; developing a referral policy for your sales force; coaching your employees to take effective steps to win more referral business; Model and learn from excellent examples of winning referral business.

The business recommendation method can obtain 10 times the profit at a cost lower than 1/5 of other sales methods. But none of us are the best at it.

So, what’s stopping you from increasing your referral business?