“Six Strategic Things To Remember When Requesting Referrals, According To Your Strategic Thinking Business Coach”
By: J. Glenn Ebersole, Jr., Chief Executive of J. G. Ebersole Associates and The Renaissance Group ™
Referrals are important to most if not all businesses today. In a professional services business, such as business coaching, referrals are a major source of new clients. One of the strategic advantages of referrals is that they tend to be good quality prospects. And another strategic advantage is that they also tend to be relatively easy to convert into clients.
Okay, so referrals are a major strategic method of gaining new clients. But, guess what? Only a small percentage of business people adopt referrals as a strategic approach to gaining new clients and those that do adopt the strategy will often neglect the needed commitment of time to generate referrals. It is imperative that you pay attention to the generation of referrals and the best way to do that is to ask for referrals at least two or three times a year from existing clients and professional and personal contacts.
There are a few strategic things to remember when requesting referrals from any of the above-mentioned sources. And your strategic thinking business coach offers the following to remember.
1. The existing client that you are going to approach must be very happy with the services you are providing to him or her. Review your client list and select those “A” list clients that are your most satisfied clients.
2. The former clients that you might ask must still be pleased about their experience with you and your company and very satisfied with your past work. It would be very prudent to review your list of former clients that you have not done work for within the last year or two and select the most satisfied from that list.
3. You must get reaffirmation of why your client is doing business with you and why they selected your company in the first place. Knowing this bit of strategic information will be very valuable in approaching the referrals given to you.
4. Ask for referrals in a positive and proactive manner. For example, you may ask, “Who do you know that is in business that would be interested in knowing about what we do and that could benefit, as you did, by using our services?”
5. Select a frequency of asking for referrals throughout the year and develop a system to do that. Experience indicates that asking for referrals 2 or 3 times per year would not be offensive and would be very productive for you.
6. Always show appreciation to and thank the people who provide referrals.
If you would like to learn more about using a strategic thinking approach to develop referrals for your business, and how a strategic thinking business coach can serve as your guide and facilitator to accomplish what you want to achieve, please contact Glenn Ebersole today through his website at www.businesscoach4u.com or by email at jgecoach@aol.com
“Six Strategic Things To Remember When Requesting Referrals, According To Your Strategic Thinking Business Coach” - To learn more about this author, visit Glenn Ebersole's Website.
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