Top Referral Selling Tactics to Get New Clients

Do You Have Gaps In Your Referral Selling Tactics?
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 vendors 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
Not only do most sales teams not have a consistent, dedicated, or proactive outbound sales strategy, but they also do not consistently measure sales referrals or hold sales reps accountable for referral-related results.  From our perspective, the most neglected revenue channel draws from existing clients. Current clients are your prospecting gold mine. They love you and would be glad to refer you, but your sales reps do not know how to effectively ask clients for referrals.

Your current clients could help you generate significant qualified opportunities for your sales pipeline. But you need to 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
Simply telling your 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 criteria for referral program success, establish 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

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 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 leads enter the sales pipeline, and reduce sales prospecting time while getting more new clients that fit your value proposition.

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