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.
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.
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.
J