The true power of referral marketing is common knowledge among many business owners and yet it’s surprising how few people have a proper system for getting the most from referrals.

• How many testimonials have you got  sitting in your bottom drawer? even if you bothered to collect the testimonials at all.
• Do you encourage referrals? or do you run a mile just as soon as the job is done.

It’s a shame because most of your customers loved your service and would very happily make a recommendation.

In this article, I’m going to show you a systematic approach for referral marketing, but first lets look at why referral marketing is so important.

Why Referral Marketing?

1. Credibility – when customers refer business to you they transfer their trust in you to their friend or business partner. Even if you’ve never heard of the referral before, your’re credibility is sky-high
2. Referrals spend more – think about it, referred business is well qualified business. Your customer would never have made the recommendation unless the referral was actively seeking your solution
3. Sometimes it’s mandatory – in a lot of industries such as consulting or professional services, it’s the only way of getting business. It’s often very difficulty for a customer to assess the value of your service upfront. Hence they rely on recommendations from trusted business partners
4. Cost effective marketing – getting customers to make recommendations and favourable feedback is mostly free. Of course, you’ve got to delight them by your service, but that’s just part of the course

When you weigh this all up, referral marketing should probably be your main priority. But you need a system or else your efforts will be “hit or miss”.

Referral Market System

At Clockwork Sales we recommend the following system for managing your referrals:

1. Always collect feedback from your customers about your service. Good or bad, your service can only get better from their comments
2. Seek permission to widely publish their feedback. With the internet, it’s very easy to publish the feedback on your website, facebook, twitter and so on..
3. Demonstrate independence and objectivity. It’s tempting to only publish the good stuff, but imagine the credibility that you’ll gain if you are objective and show the good and bad. Of course, if there’s too much bad feedback then maybe you’re in the wrong business
4. When customers provide feedback, always invite them to make recommendations. It’s the best time to do it and they very rarely decline if they’re genuinely happy with the service

Weave all this into your fundamental business processes and you’re all set to benefit from referral marketing.

Even better still, we’ve made this all very easy by offering a referral marketing machine for your website. By teaming up with the Disc Directory the process is pretty much automatic. Give us a call today on +44 (0) 2392 413771 to find out how to add the referral marketing machine to your website.