Great question, even if I did ask it myself.
Take it from one of the greatest rock bands of all time, The Rolling Stones:
“You can’t always get what you want, But if you try sometimes, well, you might find You get what you need”
I got to spend 5 hours Friday working with some old friends of mine that had been on my team when I was building an award winning BNI franchise back in the late 1990’s/early 2000’s. The subject of the meeting was to see if we could recapture what had made that time so incredible (lots of referrals), without having to reinvent the weekly lead group meeting.
I know they were startled, and you might be as well, with where I began the conversation:
“Why don’t you think you deserve referrals anymore?”
The immediate response, as I expected, was that they absolutely deserved referrals. My next question was brutal and necessary:
“Why don’t you ask for them?”
Silence ensued.
One of the things that makes my mindset and systems around referral based sales different is that I love math and truth. Everything in marketing should be measurable (at least most of it) and referrals are no different. The next step was to ask a few more questions.
”How many times did you ask for referrals this year?”
We got the answers written down on the white board and let them sink in. The numbers were simply awful and I needed them to do their work psychologically to ensure that my friends (and myself) would be ready to take action to change.
Here were the reasons:
- We didn’t feel comfortable
- We were out of practice
- We didn’t want to push our clients away by being ‘salesy’
- We thought our clients should be referring us without us asking
The real reason, in addition to the psychological ones above was that we didn’t have a system of asking for referrals AND for knowing we deserved to ask.
A real referral based sales system (the essential foundation of any #financialplanning business that wants to effortlessly grow without being a prisoner of marketing) does two things:
Give referrals on purpose and Get referrals on purpose
I am about to launch a comprehensive referral based sales training and it is going to have something that I know you haven’t been trained on before: giving referrals on purpose.
How can you feel just fine asking for referrals (help)? Two things:
1. Be someone that gives referrals on purpose…to your clients, to your friends, to other vendors that serve your clients, to your community at large.
When you know that you are giving, on purpose via a system that ensures you keep doing it, asking for referrals changes. You know that you aren’t just a ‘referral predator’ or another mindless sales automaton asking everyone you come across, regardless of relationship, to hand over their friends and family to your empty and soulless sales closing machine.
2. Remember that you are asking for help, not forcing them to refer you.
The only way you mess this up is make asking an obligation for your referral sources. Don’t do that. Instead, remember that they get to choose to help you or not. If they don’t want to refer you it might be a great opportunity for you to uncover some areas of customer experience that you have failed to deliver and/or discover a miscommunication that would result in losing your client later. Asking creates conversations and conversations drive opportunities to learn.
Don’t be too scripted.
This is a hard one, I will admit, because we are all tempted to look for the ‘easy button’. Newsflash: in relationships and sales there is no fast and easy way. There is, however, a better way: referrals.
When thinking about the language you will use focus on your client/referral source. I use words like ‘would you be comfortable’, ‘could we have a conversation about’ as mainstays of my asking conversations. In the end, you could just examine how you like being asked for help and juxtapose that with what you know about your potential referral source.
I hope this answers the question in the title for you, or, at least gets you a little bit closer.
You NEED to be asking for referrals on a consistent and systematic basis because that is the foundation of a good (measurable) referral based #sales plan. You also NEED to be giving referrals on a consistent and systematic basis because that is the foundation of knowing (and remembering) that you deserve #referrals too.
As always, I thank you for reading this article and would love to hear your thoughts and/or criticisms. Feel free to comment below and direct message me. I love hearing from you and talking about referrals. If you would like to be on the waiting list for my new course on how to make referrals predictable, just comment and/or send me a message. You will be the first to have access.
Be Human, Be Relational & Be Giving
All the best,
Mike
