John Jantsch is one of the top strategic thinkers in business today. The author of the Duct Tape Marketing blog, John mostly focuses on marketing the small business, but I find myself applying his lessons to leadership in the Fortune 500 all the time.
No System in Place
In researching his book, The Referral Engine: Teaching Your Business to Market Itself, John conducted an informal survey of thousands of business owners and found that 63 percent felt that over half of their business came by way of referrals. But of that same group, nearly 80 percent readily admitted that they had no system of any kind to generate these referrals.
Making it Simple
Even if you’re not in sales, as a leader in your organization you should aim to make it easy for existing customers to refer new ones to you. John suggests making referrals an automatic habit for your customers by equipping them with tools that allow them to introduce you and your products and services in logical ways. Some of John’s ideas include:
- Personalized referral cards that credit your customer with sending a lead
- Gift certificates with tangible value that a customer can simply hand out
- Trial offers and free evaluations only available through customer referrals
- Customer-exclusive “bring a friend” events
- Personalized web pages that customers can use to educate prospects
Money Doesn’t Talk
Interestingly, John does not advocate any kind of financial compensation for customer referrals. He explains: “when referral sources are motivated out of a desire to help, they will often go to great lengths to do so, but on the other hand, when the motivation is monetary, they will view it as a market transaction and the motivation is often significantly lower.” Instead of offering to pay them, we should consistently communicate our appreciation to loyal and vocal customers.
Do you facilitate customer referrals to your organization? If so, how?
This post was originally published on Intuit's Quickbase blog.
It is very smlipe much like doing any kind of programming Marketing is one of those things where you continue to pitch the same thing that was popular and brought in business.Our slogan is that We're smarter We say that and it makes our competition look stupid. Does that mean that they are? No. It means that we have a long road to travel and we are going to be smart about it.Another stupid thing that companies do small and big is Restructure if they were working smarter and allowing their business grow virally, they would allow the most productive piece of their business to grow, and allow the less profitable or dying piece of the business to die. Plain and smlipe we are a generation of change we embrace and live for it don't drum beat it. But the problem is that a large majority of your CEO's are white haired Baby Boomers who do not have a clue.Like I tell my wife pull over and let me drive. CEO's It may be time to pull the car over and let us drive a bit.
Posted by: Rafael | March 02, 2012 at 07:07 AM