How to Get Referrals
for Your Business

The Importance of Using Referral Marketing in Your Business

If you are like most business owners, asking for referrals is not one of your most favorite or comfortable tasks. You may even experience a sense of dread welling up in the core of your gut as you contemplate making a referral request of someone.

However, referrals have the immediate power to transform and significantly raise the bar of success you experience. Businesses have doubled, tripled, and even quadrupled their size simply through the implementation of simple, yet powerful referral systems.

Consider the following:

Referrals typically produce a higher quality client because they come from a trusted third party source who has already experienced the value you deliver. (Who doesn't want to work with better, more enjoyable clients who arrive with some level of trust already in place? I know I certainly DO!)

Referrals almost always come to you free of charge - which is great for your profit margins! (Just imagine if you had this automated and systematized so you could turn on the referral engine whenever you wanted. Your profits would soar! And, folks would be asking you for YOUR tips on how to get referrals.)

Up to 45% of service businesses are chosen based on a referral (source: Paul and Sarah Edwards, authors of Getting Business to Come to You). (In real estate and many other small business industries, doing business by referral only is not only a highly coveted goal, it is also a highly ACHIEVABLE one!)Mastering the art of how to get referrals truly is a keystone of the most successful service based businesses.

The referral is one of the top two business marketing methods, according to Dun & Bradstreet. (The other is advertising. However, the latter method rarely works for the service based business. Referrals always produce a FAR BETTER return on investment.)

So, now you are thinking - Okay, YES, of course I want referrals. Please tell me how to get those referrals, and tell me how to do it without any yucky feelings or begging. Happily, I say!

Expert Tips on How to Get an
Endless Stream of Referrals
Coming into Your Business

REFERRAL KEY #1: You must be willing and able to build and maintain ongoing relationships with people. Sure, there are ways of producing a single round of referrals from lots of folks. But, the buck stops with that first round. True referral wealth and success comes when the referrals are being repeated, and their referrals send referrals (as you extend the relationship building to this second, third, and fourth layer of folks, as well), and so on. Can you see the possibilities for geometric expansion?

REFERRAL KEY #2: You must consistently provide an above average quality of service. This does NOT mean you have to be Joe Superstar. You simply need to be someone who is passionate about delivering great value and high quality service, all with a kind, happy, caring heart.

Think about it - an average level of service is what we get just about everyday. I get it from department store managers, mortgage customer service staff, restaurant staff, satellite television customer support staff. 'Average' is everywhere and I always feel so UNIMPRESSED by it.

So, when I do experience the rare case of ABOVE AVERAGE - someone following up as promised, someone delivering just a little more than I expected, someone who demonstrates true caring about me and my experience - I am SO IMPRESSED. Maybe I am easy, but just a step ABOVE AVERAGE is so uncommon that it rocks my world when it happens. So, I know that you can deliver this!

REFERRAL KEY #3: You must have an ongoing, consistent, repeatable, easy-to-use system that requires very little time, money, or effort to manage and keep running. The very best referral marketing systems are those that can be automated. Sure, they may take minimal up front time to develop and set up. However, the payoffs from such a system can be HUGE! Remember, think GEOMETRIC EXPANSION of referrals where friends, family, colleagues and past clients tell two friends, and those friends tell two friends, and so on.

If you keep wondering how to get referrals or why your referral generation activities are not working as expected, ask yourself if you are meeting the THREE REFERRAL KEYS outlined above. Then, read more of the articles that you will find in this 'Get Referrals' section of this website.

Want to learn more about how to get referrals? Click on any of the links below to access more referral marketing articles.

Want learn about a powerful referral marketing system that I recently discovered? Click here.