As a sales professional, you own your business – this is your territory, your area, your vertical market, or whatever patch of earth you call your area to get out there and sell! As a sales professional, you (hopefully) are spending a great deal of time prospecting and developing clients and then CLOSING them! That also means that along the way you have developed a good relationship with your clients! So, let me ask you this…are you leveraging your relationships within your client base to ask for referrals to new prospects so that you can earn more business? Are you networking inside your satisfied clients and finding new opportunities? Great sales professionals are always doing this! Further to the point, now that we are in Q4 and it’s time to get the numbers in, this is a fantastic way to add some opportunities to your pipeline that you can close NOW and set yourself up for a strong Q1, 2008.
To talk more about this topic, I have asked a colleague of mine, David Carter, to comment further on this important topic for the sales community. David is a Certified Master Mentor and President of ActionCOACH here in Philadelphia. He has some excellent thinking around building your business through great referrals. This is an important lesson for all members of the ToddCohen.com Sales Community.
Please read the article here. It is this week’s featured Todd Cohen.com Sales Column.
Todd,
Impressive!
Jerry
I like most of David’s ideas, but I think his advice to “make referrals a condition of doing business with you” is controversial at best. I think referrals are a natural outgrowth of fantastic customer service and a strong and compelling value proposition.
When I think of the businesses I refer to my friends, it is because those businesses have something that I think my friends could use and appreciate.
To use an example, we had our kitchen remodeled a few years back. After much searching, we discovered Kitchens by George in Concordville. Our kitchen wasn’t an easy space to work with, but Kitchens by George came up with a fantastic design that made effective use of every cubic inch in the kitchen. Even better, once they came to our house to start work, Kitchens by George demolished our old kitchen and installed our new one in ONE WEEK!
Great design and the fastest install time I’ve ever heard of — both represent compelling business values that make me happy to tell my friends to talk to Kitchens by George about their kitchen projects. (See, I’ve just given them another referral!)
The dramatic changes sweeping through the advertising world are a direct outgrowth of the transformation of markets into conversations. The Cluetrain Manifesto recognized this nearly a decade ago (www.cluetrain.com), and Malcom Gladwell codified it further in “The Tipping Point.”
The premise is that people do business with people they trust or based on recommendations from people they trust, not the guy who wears a white coat in the aspirin commercial and says “I’m not a doctor, but I play one on TV.”
So what’s more important than the great branding and the snazzy commercials today is whether the customers have had a sufficiently positive experience that they will recommend that company to people in their “circle of trust.”
For sales people, that means paying close attention to the customer experience and making sure that it’s one that makes their clients WANT to get their friends and colleagues to use the product.