It’s Referral Monday and as always, I’m writing about building your referral marketing program for your business.  The first part of building a referral marketing plan is actually deserving referrals and believing that you do.  Once you’re convinced that you deserve referrals, then you can actually work at executing the rest of your referral marketing plan.

Execution of the plan requires that you actually collect on the referral.  You built your plan, you communicated who your target market is, you set the expectation that you were going to ask for a referral, you delivered an exceptional experience to your client so the referral motivation is there, unfortunately, you never actually ask for it.

Do You Collect on Your Referrals?

In order to have an effective Referral Marketing plan involving your customers, you have to actually collect on the referral.  The best time to ask for a referral is when your customer acknowledges a job well done.  The point here is for you to ensure that you have the processes set up in your business so you can collect feedback.  This should take the form of annual results reviews, project reviews, and satisfaction surveys and reintroduce the concept of referrals and remind your customers about your referral programs during these reviews.

While this is the perfect time to ensure that you’ve delivered as promised and getting referrals, it’s also an opportunity to fix anything that might have gone wrong.  Reviews like this also give you the occasion to think about continuous improvements to the experience you deliver.  Referral marketing is a process and you’ll want to be sure you’re taken yours full circle to collect your referral.

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It’s Referral Monday and every Monday, I write about Referral Marketing.  In order to be a Referable Business, you have to deserve referrals.  A referable business is one that makes business memorable and exciting so its clients will start talking about it. 

A key ingredient to becoming a referable business is to create an awesome experience.  People don’t talk about boring businesses.  When a client has an awesome experience, they’re happy to share the details and they’ll shout it from the rooftop. 

If you've created a WOW experience, your clients will shout it from the rooftops.

A referable business is one that has created a memorable experience and makes clients feel compelled to share their thoughts and spread the good word about the business.  They’ll essentially do the selling for you—and that’s the whole point of referral marketing. 

In order to continue to deserve referrals though, you need to keep that level of experience going—from the first interaction with a prospect through the first sale and into every subsequent sale and service inquiry thereafter.

Regardless of what tools your clients use to talk about you, you still have to ensure that you deliver that WOW factor on a consistent basis.  Figuring it out takes some work and some dedication and it’s an ongoing process.  But once you’ve got the right mindset, you’ll always be on the lookout for making every part of your business a smash hit.

Do you do business with an organization that delivers WOW?  I’d love to hear about it.  Next week, I’ll share some ways to create that WOW factor.

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Are you committed to your Referral Marketing Program?

Today is Referral Monday and every Monday I write a post about Referral Marketing.  Every week, I write about some aspect of developing a Referral Marketing system for your business and this week, I wanted spend some time talking about what that really means.

Building a business based on referrals means that you’ve invested time in understanding what a referable business is.  And building a business based on referrals doesn’t happen overnight.  It takes time and a huge amount of commitment—commitment to developing the right relationships that will help you build your business.

The key here is to invest the time and effort to building long-term relationships that will pay off in increased referrals.  We don’t refer people right after meeting them.  We have to take the time to understand their business, what they do for clients and what kind of clients they work with best.  We want to know what kind of results others have had using them.  Even as a referral partner, we have to take the time to get to know, like and trust them, just as anyone would that’s interested in doing business with them.   Once we’ve built that trust, then we’re ready to bring in our own trusted network and see who they might be able to help.

Building a business based on referrals is a very systematic and planned process.  You need to inventory the areas in your network where you are in need of trusted partners to refer to.  It requires mapping out your requirements and then identifying a path to establishing those partnerships.  In some cases, you may not already know a trusted source so you’ll need to search through your network.  You’ll invest time in simply finding the individual and then you’ll also invest time in ensuring they are the source that you need. 

Not only does it take time to build your referral network.  It takes time for the network to grow into the referral generating system you’re looking for.  My advice to you–Invest the time in yourself and your business—this is still the most cost-effective way to build your business.

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