What is your sales team thankful for? Customer referrals. For sales professionals, a customer referral is a key that can unlock many doors.
A referral from a happy customer is more powerful than a cold call, sales materials and data. According to the B2B Content Academy, 71% of B2B decision-makers claimed that articles or sales presentations littered with statistics didn’t help them with their buying decisions.
However, 84% of B2B decision makers start their buying process with a referral.
Since customer referrals are such an important part of your sales process, we’re running a two-part series on how to get more referral leads. In Julie’s recent post, she discussed how to motivate your advocates to send you a steady stream of referral leads.
In this post, I’ll take you through our customer referral workflow, so you can see how we involve our advocates every step of the way.
When should you ask for a referral?
Here are five great times to ask for referrals:
- When you sign a new customer and they are excited about working with you
- Right after they give you a Net Promoter Score® of nine or above
- Just after they launch your program or implement your service, as they’re looking forward to seeing results
- When you learn that they got amazing results from your product or service
- When they say nice things about you
How transparency drives customer referrals
Advocates are more likely to give you referrals if they know you will treat their referred friends, family and colleagues like gold. That’s why it’s vital to give advocates transparency into your referral workflow.
We have a challenge in our advocate marketing program, Influitive VIP, that asks advocates to send us referrals. The challenge looks like this:
After an advocate submits a referral, they can log in at any time and see how the referral is progressing through our four-part sales process:
- Referral submitted
- A sales representative contacts the referred lead to schedule a demo
- Demo
- The referred lead becomes a customer
Advocates want to know how a referral is going and if they can do anything to help. They want to see the referred lead turn into a customer.
Our customer referral results
Timing our customer referral requests right and making our referral workflow transparent has helped us boost sales.
Although referrals represent just a small fraction (3%) of the overall leads generated by our marketing team, their impact on our sales pipeline and revenue is extraordinary.
Nearly one quarter of our opportunities are created from those referred leads and 38% of our customers have come from referrals.
Furthermore, 42% of Influitive’s monthly recurring revenue – almost half! – can be sourced back to referrals.
So, what are you waiting for? You probably have lots of advocates who love your service and are willing to give you referrals. When you put the word out, you may be surprised by how many referrals your advocates send your way.
