Referrals trump all other forms of business leads.
It’s one of the most effective sources of new business. Referral relationships are based on trust and confidence toward the referral partner; thus you are assured of a quality lead. They also cost less, and they shorten your sales cycle, thus taking less of your time compared to other new-business efforts.
So it’s extremely important for a business to have this kind of relationship and, most importantly, to get it optimised to deliver more qualified leads.
In this new 2 Minutes On series titled How to Make Referral Relationships Work, you will learn the eight things that really make a difference in a referral relationship.
Navigate seamlessly through the rest of the series by clicking on one of the links below.
- Part 1 – Why Do Relationships Fail?
- Part 2 – Re-Engineer Your Business Processes and Get the Top 5
- Part 3 – Create a Combined Value Proposition, Systemise, and Make It Easy
- Part 4 – Qualify More, Add Value, and Commit
And now here’s Jeff Cooper to tell you more about it in the first of four episodes on How to Make Referral Relationships Work.
The following text is a transcript of the video.
Why Do Relationships Fail?
If you are a professional services firm, I bet you have a referral partnership program on your marketing plan. I bet it’s been there for a couple of years as well.
But here’s the thing: we know that when they work, they work amazingly. They deliver more leads at a cheaper cost per lead that convert more to allow us to maintain margin.
But unfortunately, they kind of work in a patchy way, don’t they? Some of our partners are bringing in heaps of leads. Others just don’t seem to be able to deliver month on month.
So we asked ourselves, what are the things that really make a difference in a referral relationship, and how can we get them rocking?
When the BRW magazine estimates that $635 is the average cost per lead across category, B2B and consumer, we are able to intuit that in professional services, it could be as high as $3,000 to $6,000 to get a lead. And converting that business into a win can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars.
It’s difficult.
The first thing to do is look at why they don’t work. First of all, selling our businesses as well as resell is actually a really difficult thing to do. It comes with stress, pressure, and tension.
Partners forget.
Most of our referral partners just forget. They’re so busy in their own world trying to make their own businesses a success, it’s very hard to really think about other people’s business and match them up.
We’re dealing with a lot of people.
We’ve also got a lot of referral partners that have a decentralised new-business function. We’re not dealing with one person who goes to all the meetings. There’s a percentage of many people within that business. That means all of them need to know the value proposition, all of them need to know how to spot an opportunity, and all of them need to be trained and have the tools to make it work.Are you interested on becoming Step Change’s referral partner? Fill in the referral partner form below, and let’s chat.
J
eff Cooper is Step Change’s Founding Partner. Jeff learnt his most valuable lessons in strategic thinking by spending his own money. His entrepreneurial pursuits began back in 2004 when he started his first business, designing exhibition spaces and running events, eventually giving birth to an interactive event concept later adopted by the likes of Big Day Out and other major festival organisers. A decade later, in 2014–2015, startups Jeff was involved in raised over $1m in investment, and Step Change — which he co-founded — became a multimillion-dollar strategy consultancy, serving clients across five continents. He’s a true generalist, with ownership and Board interests in businesses from retail solar to beauty and beyond, at life stages from startup to over $150m revenue annually.
