Referrals are crucial for sales in the world of B2B marketing. In fact, 84% of B2B decision-makers begin the purchase process with a referral. Referred customers lead to bigger sales, provide high valued customer lifecycles, and generate faster sales. They’re a powerful way to grow your business’s revenue, and should be a top priority.
Prospective customers are naturally skeptical of your business’s claims. It can take a few interactions and some marketing heft to build a relationship and start developing trust in your company. Referred customers, on the other hand, enter the relationship with a higher trust value associated with your company.
Relationship building is foundational to Inbound Marketing, and it’s at the core of customer delight. Without a trusting relationship, even the most persuasive marketing falls flat. It can take time to prove your trustworthiness—you’ve got to put in the work to nurture leads, provide value, and position your company as an empathetic authority.
Any contact who comes to you with existing trust in your company saves your marketing and sales teams time and money. You’ll still need to nurture the referral and deepen the relationship, but the initial legwork has been done and they’ll start at a higher level in the buyer’s journey.
Related: Lead Nurturing: How To Keep Your Prospects Engaged
Referred customers are 37% more likely to stick around than customers who purchased without a referral. That’s a big win for your customer retention rate, and your bottom line. Customer retention rates are a big focus for all companies, but especially B2B organizations that have a longer sales cycle.
Pro Tip: Not only are referred customers in the relationship for the long haul, they’re also more likely to buy bigger. Larger sales and longer relationships? Sounds like getting referrals should be a top priority.
Customers need to believe you’re capable of handling their problems and alleviating their pain points. Nobody wants to do business with someone who can’t deliver.
On your own, positioning your company as an authority is a tricky dance. You don’t want to come on too strong, which reads as braggadocious and obnoxious, but your leads need to believe you know your stuff. This is where it takes two to tango. Your dance partner is the customer who gives a referral.
Remember that referred customers come to you with trust baked into the relationship. That means they’re more likely to follow your suggestions. Why? Because they trust your authority to solve their problems— just like you solved their friend or colleague’s problems.
Related: 3 Ways You Can Sell To Your Existing Customers
Let’s do a brief recap. So far we know that referred customers trust your company more, stay in a relationship longer, and are more likely to follow your suggestions. The sum of these parts is that referred customers have faster sales cycles. Prospects who come to you through referrals are already interested in doing business with you, which means the sales process moves faster and the sale is easier to close.
Now that you know how valuable referred customers are, let’s dive into how you can get more referrals for your business.
Here’s the cold, hard, truth: even the happiest of customers probably won’t give a referral without being asked. That means you’ll need to ask your customers directly to share their experience with others.
Most businesses make two huge mistakes when they ask for referrals.
The first mistake is that they ask for a referral way too late in the game, usually after the customer has been using the product for a period of time. You might think your customer needs time with the product or service before they refer your company, but that’s not the case. Instead, you need to capitalize on the excitement they feel right after the sale. That’s when you’re most likely to get a glowing referral.
The second mistake companies make is that asking for referrals isn’t baked into the process. There’s no template for how or when to ask for a referral, which means there’s a high likelihood that it’s not getting done.
You’ll probably have to ask for a referral twice, once to put it on your customer’s radar, and again to follow up. If there isn’t a repeatable process in place for how to ask for a referral and when to follow up, you simply won’t get it.
When you need a holistic B2B marketing strategy that works, you need Team Sauce. Getting referrals is just one cog in the wheel of transforming your business into a revenue-generating machine, and we’re here to help. Schedule your free Connect Call today to find out how you can build the process of getting more referrals and #GrowSmarter.