Referral marketing is an essential strategy for most small business owners. Effectively managing your referral is one of the easiest ways to increase the quantity and quality of your sales leads.
A Contact Manager
Contact management may seem like an obvious necessity to good referral marketing but you’d be surprised just how many people assume their “gmail” is the best way to manage their contacts. The best marketers keep notes and classify contacts into categories that make sense for them i.e. friends, colleagues, referral partners, clients, prospects, U.S., Canada, …..
Throwing your contacts into one e-mail list puts you at a real disadvantage.
Referral Tracking
Referral tracking is one of the most overlooked stages of the referral process. It can be relativity easy to network and find people with need professional services however, it is tracking those leads that will truly help you drive revenue. From the moment you receive a sales lead until after you have closed, you should use a tool that can help answer these fundamental questions:
Do you think the referral will result in a sale?
Did the client expect you to contact them?
Who did this referral come from?
Did the referral result in a sale?
When did you follow up with the prospect?
When was the referral sent?
Was the referral qualified?
Was the referral timely?
Reciprocity Reports
Reci…what?!! Reciprocity reports let you and your referral partners understand how you view your professional relationship. In other words, you may get a lot of business from Dave the realtor and maybe you don’t send Dave an equitable number of referrals. Perhaps, you forgot, didn’t think Dave wanted new business, or just haven’t had an opportunity. Whatever the reason, this relationship will eventually break down because it is imbalanced.
A reciprocity report asks both parties to rate their referral relationship as either “balanced”, “I should send more referrals”, or “I should receive more referrals”. If either person indicated an “imbalance” in the relationship, both parties will be made aware and encouraged to open a dialog.
Surely, you can think of at least a few professional relationships that have either become inactive or sour because either person didn’t feel the relationship with balanced.
