Top Referral Selling Tactics to Get New Clients

Do You Have Gaps In Your Referral Selling Tactics?
We know form business sales training that a qualified referred prospect is more than 40 times more likely to buy than a cold-called prospect, and more than three-quarters of buyers prefer to work with companies who have been recommended by someone they know. Despite these impressive statistics, sales referrals are hit-and-miss in most sales organizations.

The Most Neglected New Client Acquisition Strategy
We know from project postmortem data that high performing sales teams have a consistent, dedicated, and proactive outbound sales strategy that is supported by a culture of accountability that consistently holds sales reps accountable for referral-related results.  Sadly, those sales teams are in the minority.

From our perspective, the most neglected revenue channel is related to leveraging existing clients. Current clients are a sales prospecting gold mine. Happy clients love you and would be glad to refer you, but most sales reps report either not  being comfortable or now knowing how to effectively ask clients for referrals.

Your current clients could help you generate significant qualified opportunities for your sales pipeline. But your sales team needs to consistently and thoughtfully ask.

A Successful Sales Referral Program
A successful sales referral program requires your commitment to a proactive outbound referral system that makes referrals a lead-gen priority. That means agreeing to:

• Develop a sales referral plan with company, team, and individual referral goals.
• Provide opportunities for your sales reps to build referral selling skills.
• Reinforce and coach to new ways of selling and prospecting.

Top Referral Selling Tactics to Get New Clients
We know from consultative sales training that simply telling your sales team to ask for new client referrals will not work.  But a disciplined and measurable sales referral system will.

1.  Craft a Strategic Referral Selling Plan
Establish specific goals to drive a sales referral culture.  Create referral program objectives, establish success metrics, integrate referrals into your sales process, and identify overlooked opportunities.  The most common sales referral metrics include:

• Number of people asked
• Number of referrals received
• Number of meetings scheduled
• Number of meetings conducted
• Win rate

2.  Develop Referral Selling Skills
Ensure that your sales reps know how to:

• Tell Your Story
  Craft a compelling and buyer-centric story that outlines the pressing problems that you solve and the impact that you deliver.
• Find Your Ideal Target Client
  Define and focus your efforts on ideal target clients where you should win the majority of the time.
• Discover Your Network
  Build your outreach plan, identify your best referral sources, and prioritize where and how you spend your business development time.
• Ask with Competence and Confidence
  Learn a proven process to ask for referrals, bypass the gatekeeper, and shorten your sales cycle.
• Practice and Feedback
  Use robust practice and feedback to build your referral selling skills.

3.  Build Your Sales Referral Plan
Build a referral action plan with referral tracking and sales accountability metrics.  Changing behavior requires consistent reinforcement and frequent sales coaching to keep people on track, increase confidence, develop competence, and drive new client revenue.

The Bottom Line
These proven referral selling tactics shorten the sales cycle, ensure that only qualified sales leads enter the sales pipeline, and reduce sales prospecting time while getting more new clients that fit your unique value proposition.

To learn more about getting more sales referrals, download How to Bypass the Gatekeeper to Get New Client Meetings