5 Steps to Successful Referral Selling

Joanne Black, Founder of No More Cold Calling, Speaker, and Author

When you ask for referrals from your clients, customers, and networks, future sales success can be — quite literally — one phone call or meeting away. By keeping the following steps in mind, you’ll be able to kick-start your referral selling, bring even more opportunities into your pipeline, and set yourself up to meet or exceed your sales quota.

1. Make a strategy and create accountability.

Why don’t more sales teams make referrals a priority? There are several reasons. First, sales leaders don’t understand that there must be a strategy. You have to put a stake in the ground and say, “Referral selling will be our #1 outbound prospecting strategy.”

Your KPIs set your team’s priorities. If reps are accountable for the number of calls made and emails sent, or for their presence on social media, then those activities get the most attention. If you don’t do the same thing for referrals, your team won’t ask.

2. Build a list.

Once you have your strategy in place, sales reps should build a list of the people they know, starting with their clients and others in their networks, and organized by the strength of the relationships. It’s not just about the number of contacts; it’s about the relationships that people have with their contacts. Someone with 200 connections on LinkedIn might have much better leads for you than someone with thousands.

3. Never ask in a digital format.

I can’t emphasize this point enough: Salespeople should never ask for referrals in a digital format. That means no social and no email. The point is simply to be talking, not typing. Why? Because people do business with people, not with technology.

I have one client — a sales VP — who tells her team, “We don’t close deals by email.” This couldn’t be truer for referral selling.

To read the complete article, 5 Steps to Successful Referral Selling, visit Quotable.com.