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Want More Business Referrals?
By Michael | September 25, 2008
Referrals are one of the least costly methods for acquiring new clients that you will ever be able to add to your business. If you are already getting a lot of referrals from your existing clients than you are doing a lot of things right.
Referrals typically come from primarily one of three sources:
1) Existing clients.
2) Business allies, associates, or networking contacts.
3) People you know socially: your friends, your family, significant others of your friends, etc.
Your primary source for getting new clients by referral is going to be from your existing clients. If you don’t have a whole lot of existing clients, referrals can quickly improve things for you.
If any of your business building efforts included networking to get other business professionals to refer to you, this will help a lot.
Focus on getting complementary business professionals to refer to you first. This will produce the quickest results.
One of the complementary business professionals is actually other freelancers. If you are a specialist, it’s easy to give and receive referrals from other freelancers. That’s because you probably are not in competition with them.
For example, if you specialize in an area like financial market copywriting, then most copywriters aren’t competing in the same niche trying to get the same copywriting jobs. If you specialize in graphic design for offline marketing, then graphic designers who focus on online marketing work aren’t your competition.
The frequency of referrals can be intermittent
if you are not using a referral system.
There is a big difference between having a referral system and just plain referrals.
A referral system is a systemized process you use
to encourage other people to refer to you.
I highly recommend you use a referral system for several reasons.
If you rely on strictly on word of mouth advertising, or people to refer to you when they think of it…
…most people won’t ever think of you.
People are too busy in their own lives to be concerned about the health of your business.
Maybe, once in a while, if you knock the socks off a client with your work, they may refer to you their business ally or a friend.
With no referral system, there will be no
predictable stream of referrals coming in.
Let’s compare this with someone who is using a dedicated referral system. You really deliver an awesome sales letter to a grateful client. Using a dedicated referral system you are telling her who she can refer, based on your areas of expertise.
It sounds simple but it’s an incredibly powerful marketing method. In fact, I believe in it so much that I’ve created a live training series on referral systems.
It’s called Easy Referral Systems and over 3 days, 3+ hours, I’ll share the complete scoop on referral systems and give you 35 different referral systems that you can easily plug into your business and start using right away. Or if you’re a business consultant, you can use them with your clients’ businesses and watch their profits skyrocket.
Training starts on Thursday September 25th and will increase in price each week until the live training has been completed. Simply head to http://www.easyreferralsystems.com to get the full details.
Until next time,
Mike Humphreys
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