How To Earn More Referrals Every Month

Become hub for your clientsReferrals are your best source of business.  They come with recommendation in hand, looking to do business with you based on the advice of someone they (hopefully) know and trust.  A wonderful source of business.

Many professional services industries, like real estate agents and accountants,  live off of referrals from current and past clients.

But what happens when you're not getting enough referrals to grow or even sustain your business?

This usually happens when…..

  • You're a new business and your customer base isn't big enough to generate a meaningful amount of referrals yet
  • You're generating referrals, but not enough to grow your business bigger than where you are now
  • You're an existing business but don't generate many referrals (big red flag for you)

While referral business is the holy grail of lead generation, it's not something that happens by chance.  Businesses that thrive off of referral business work hard at building relationships and are proactive in generating them.

This doesn't mean they are pushy when it comes to asking for referrals, though there's nothing wrong with making it clear you'd love one, it means they put themselves in a position where it's natural for others to recommend them.

What is Referral Marketing?

Simply put, it's creating and executing marketing strategies that will lead to people referring you. It's many of the  activities that you are probably doing now, except that now you have a clear outcome in mind and you've created a plan to deliver those activities on a consistent basis.

Referrals don't always come naturally

Even if you're awesome at what you do, most people won't refer you to their friends.  Why?  It's not in their nature.

Ever read reviews online?  Almost all of the reviews you read on Yelp or Amazon, come from a small fraction of people that buy and use those products and services.  They are people that like to share their experiences with others, good and bad.

The others?  They simply use whatever it is they purchased with no thought about sharing it with others.  It just never occurs to them.  They need a nudge, they need you to put them in a position where it's almost impossible for them to not refer you.  Just doing a great job and hoping for a referral doesn't work with these people.

So what do you do?

You create a plan.

It starts with making the decision that referrals are a real part of your marketing strategy and not something that is left to chance.  It's about being proactive in your efforts, doing activities that will put you in prime position for a referral.

I think the most important part of creating a referral plan to is create consistency.  Many of the activities we'll talk about below you're probably already doing, but not consistently and without a clear outcome in mind.

Below is what I do when it comes to positioning myself for a referral.  You may do things a little differently and may add or remove some activities, the main point is that you have a plan and remain proactive in generating referrals for your business.

Organize Contacts

The first step is to organize yourself.  This is hard for me.  I love to organize, the trouble is that I try and use too many things to organize myself, pen and paper, several different apps…..I'm like a digital squirrel storing information randomly across platforms and can rarely find information when I really need it.

I don't need a full fledged CRM, I've tried several times in the past and it never stuck.  Now I use two tools, Gmail (actually the business version, Google Apps) and Evernote.

Inside Gmail, I use the Contact manager to store my contacts and to organize them.  The Contact manager inside Gmail is actually pretty powerful.  Some of the highlights are:

  • Create custom fields inside each contact, sort of like a tagging system, so you can easily search through your contacts based on the Tags you've created
  • It uses Google's powerful search platform to accurately find what you're looking for inside your contact list
  • You can create Groups for your contacts and add each contact to a single or multiple Groups
  • If they have a Google+ profile, it will automatically populate the contact page with their G+ info
  • You can call your contacts directly from the Contact manager

As you can see, there are lots of powerful features inside the Gmail Contact Manager, I haven't listed them all, just the highlights.

The way I organize my contact list is to create different Groups to organize my list.  You can organize your groups how it will best work for you.  For me, I create my groups based on location for my clients, specifically by country.  From there, I create custom fields (or use the dozen or so standard choices in Gmail) and add Tags to each client based on how I will need to pull up my list as needed.

An example is using the Birthday field in your contact list.  If you wanted to send a birthday card to your clients for next month, you can simply do a search for “Birthday March” and Gmail will pull up a list of contacts that have the “March” Tag under the Birthday field.  You can basically set this Tagging system up anyway you like as Gmail lets you create your own custom fields.

When it comes to Evernote, I use it to find, store and share useful information I find for my clients.  If you've never used Evernote, it can be a game changer in how you organize not only your business, but your life.  It takes awhile to get into it, but once you make the decision to “jump in”, you'll probably never go back to anything else.

So the way I use Evernote in this case is to save useful articles and items I find on the web that would be useful for my clients.  Evernote lets you “clip” items from the web from your browser, phone or tablet with the push of a button. I save useful articles (organized in several “Notebooks” in Evernote) that I find on the web that may be useful to my clients.  Once saved in Evernote I can then share these resources with my clients when I want to reach out to them.  It's part of my strategy of becoming a resource for my clients, even outside of our business relationship.

An example of how you would use this is to save articles you find related to one of your clients industry.  Maybe they missed this information and would appreciate that you're looking out for them.  You can also use it if you know what hobbies or sports teams your client likes, share information you find that they might have missed.  It's a great reason to connect with a client besides the old boring line of, “Hey, just calling to see how you're doing”.

Don't waste people's time, if you're going to reach out, be useful.

Be a Resource

Like I mentioned above, part of my strategy is to become a resource for my clients, even outside of our business relationship.  Being super useful to them helps to create bonds that outsiders won't be able to break without a sledgehammer.  It protects your relationship and gives you some peace of mind knowing a “cold call” to your client from a competitor is easily deflected.

The more you can “give” to your clients, the more they will be willing to “give” back to you.  I read somewhere once, don't remember where, that you should give 20 times to someone for every time you ask for something.  The key here is to keep giving value non-stop to your clients so when the time comes for you to ask, they're ecstatic for the opportunity to help you.

Be a Connector

To take it to the next level, don't just look for opportunities to connect with your client, look for opportunities to connect them with other valuable resources.  Great networkers are always looking for opportunities to connect people in their network with each other.  They thrive on being the person that brings others together and makes things happen.  It's in their nature and it's very satisfying to them.

Become the “Hub” in your client's business life.  Be the person that brings it all together, the first person they think about when they need help, even if it's not your field of expertise.  They contact you because they know if you can't help them, you'll know someone who can.  You've now become an indispensable resource for that client.

Ask for Help

If you've accomplished the above and have become a great resource for your clients, asking them for help should be the easy part.  People naturally want to help people they like, especially if they feel “they owe them one”.  If you've built up enough good will, they'll be more than happy to help.

People think that other's don't like it when you ask for their help, but quite the contrary.  People live to be helpful, it gives them a great sense of satisfaction knowing someone else thought them valuable enough to ask for help.  Ben Franklin knew this well.  He knew all about the power of asking for favors..

I prefer to ask for help on a one on one level, it works better when it's personalized.  I might send a dozen or so emails asking clients that I'm available to take on another client and if they knew someone who might find my service helpful, I'd appreciate any leads.  I rarely have to as many clients naturally refer me, but the few occasions I have, it worked great.

You can also ask for help en mass via social media or your email list.  Are you a Realtor with a new house on the market?  Instead of crafting a superlative laden cheesy sales pitch, why not just contact your clients and ask them for help in selling this house.  Ask them (as a favor to you) to search their own networks to see if this property will be a fit for anyone they know.  If you've built enough good will, this works.

Say Thank You

Always say thank you when someone helps you out, always.  I try for a phone call or hand written note, but an email will work too.  If they know you really appreciate it, they're much more likely to help you again in the future.  You'd be surprised how many people miss this step and are then surprised when people aren't so eager to help them a second time.

Even if their help didn't pan out for you, thank them just the same.

What do you do to earn more referrals?

The above is what I do to help earn more referrals, there are lots of other ways to do it too.  The key is to no let referrals happen by chance.  Create a plan where you become so helpful to your clients that they will do backflips to help you when call on them for help.

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Gary

CEO at 3Bug Media
Gary Shouldis is the founder of 3Bug Media, a web marketing company that helps businesses create 360 Marketing Strategies to dominate their market. His blog is read by over 20 thousand small business owners a month and has been featured in the N.Y. Times Small Business, Business Insider and Yahoo Small Business.