Recommend the Most Certain Way to Grow Your Profits
Business growth consultants specialize in helping businesses grow. Their recommendations and services have to be cost-effective for them to stay employed, and win referrals from new businesses.
This is why they recommend asking for referrals as one of the key strategies for winning new business and making more profits.
Asking for referrals is one method of winning new referrals. It is one method that is often ignored.
Often when I am meeting with clients, and ask how they win their new business, they proudly tell me that they don’t need to do any marketing because they get most of the new business through referrals.
I ask them how many referrals strategies they have?
Would you believe, the percentage of times they tell me they don’t have one, is virtually hundred percent.
Well clearly they have one strategy, and that is doing enough good quality work, and managing the relationship well enough, to be recommended. This is the baseline. Failure to even achieve this will result in a business that has nowhere to go. Its bad reputation would always outweigh any marketing they did.
However, simply doing good work and managing the relationship well is not enough. It is not proactive. It is not a marketing strategy beyond the norm.
As business growth consultants ourselves, we have seven referral strategies that we implement when working with our clients. Of course it is nice when we get a referral without any of these other seven strategies working.
However, in our case, it would mean that we would have approximately 50% less clients than we do.
These represent the clients we win from our other seven strategies for winning referrals.
I’m not counting here the clients we win through our marketing activities. I am simply talking about our referral strategies. Winning work through our association with the clients who are thrilled with the results we get them!
The most common reason why people do not ask, is because they feel it is rude. But that is an error of judgement. There are many ways of asking for a referral without being rude.
How about saying something like “We really appreciate your business, and I’m glad you are pleased with the results we are getting you. Can you think of another business you know, maybe a supplier or a client, who could use the same type of benefits we gained for you?”
The best time to ask for a referral is after you have done a great job, and the client is very pleased with the results they have received. But there are also other times that come close to being as good. How much could this strategy be worth to your business in the next 30 days, or one-year?
What can you do to systematically introduce referral systems into your business and process today?
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