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How to start an avalanche of referrals

Guest post by: Gerry Black

Article Overview: There is no better new customer than a referral from a happy customer. But most businesses don't have a plan in place to generate referrals. They simply take them as they come without giving much thought to how they might be able to create a steady stream of referral business. Before you can do that however, it's important to understand the following referral truth. Satisfied customers do not send referrals in droves. The referral avalanche comes from clients and customers who are enthusiastic, inspired and awed from their experience with you. Bottom line: Being good ain't good enough if you want tons of referrals. If you continue to simply meet your customer's expectations, your referral rate won't change. So what can you do to have your customer rave about you?

How to start an avalanche of referrals

There is no better new customer than a referral from a happy customer.

But most businesses don't have a plan in place to generate referrals. They simply take them as they come without giving much thought to how they might be able to create a steady stream of referral business.

Before you can do that however, it's important to understand the following referral truth.

Satisfied customers do not send referrals in droves. The referral avalanche comes from clients and customers who are enthusiastic, inspired and awed from their experience with you.

Bottom line: Being good ain't good enough if you want tons of referrals. If you continue to simply meet your customer's expectations, your referral rate won't change.

So what can you do to have your customer rave about you?

Consider what one dentist did. He provides dental care to children. After attending a seminar on creative thinking, he identified a number of things he could do to tailor his practice to the needs of his patients.

Here are some of the things he did;

*He redesigned his office to provide maximum comfort to his target market. He lowered the reception staff into a pit behind the counter so they were at eye level with the patients.

*He hung giant photographs of each dentist and dental assistant along with descriptions of each person's hobbies and interests, so new patients could pick their dentists and assistants based on having something in common.

*He gave away free bicycles! Every patient got a "homecare follow-through Report Card" for his or her parents to fill out. If the Report Card came back to the dentist with all As, the child got the bicycle. (Imagine - there's little Johnny riding around the neighborhood on his new bike and people ask him who got it for him and he answers, "My dentist.")

*He called each new patient at home the evening after treatment to see how the patient was feeling."

*He called each parent the day after the the child's treatment.

*Each new patient left the office the first time with an autographed "8 x 10" glossy of his dentist and dental assistant.

The result of his creative thinking?

He multiplied his practice by ten in just one year without any increase in his advertising budget.

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Article Tags: getting referrals, referral rate, referrals



Related Forum Posts
Re: Service Or Product? - IdeasUniversity, I agree. Some people go to all that work of getting everything set up for their business and they think people will just see it and want to patronize it. They don't realize that they have to spend money to make money and they end up quitting before they ever really get started. I think that happens a lot in mid-sized towns. You tend to see start ups and then less than a year later you'll see the building standing there vacant. Advertising it probably the biggest part of starting a business. Then once you have some satisfied customers, you'll start getting referrals and you may actually start seeing a profit, but you still need to keep advertising if you want to start making a good profit and continue to grow. If there's something you're going to skimp on, it shouldn't be this.
Customer Service - Great customer service, referrals and positive word of mouth are effective ways to promote your business. I've found that educating my customers about the sort of referrals I want is very valuable. While this sort of promotion can be very effective, it is only one type of advertising that should be done. Of course, the amount of promotion that you need to do depends on the amount of business you need to generate. Chris
20% increase - One of my businesses uses a system to help business owners manage customer relationships and encourage more referrals. I'm finding that this economy is making business owners take a second look at their business and it's assets (aka customers) to see how they can leverage them. Make those Customers (one-time sale) into Clients (repeat sales). I'm finding them more open to having this discussion with me and the results are speaking for itself. Everyone I've worked with so far has seen at least a 20% increase in sales or referrals within 4-6 months all done by managing an existing relationship.
Re: How to gain more website traffic? - Something overlooked often is guest blogging. I have done it once and an avalanche of traffic poured onto the linked site. Really, it's a smart strategy to perhaps look at what kind of blogs people are [i:3blz5tcm]already[/i:3blz5tcm] reading online and who is accepting guest blogging. Start doing guest blogging in that market and write more of what people are reading. I know a guy who does this quite a bit, and his advice is to attach an html formatted blog post to an email and approach the publisher. He said if he doesn't get one accepted, he'll just keep approaching others until it gets accepted.
Forum Referral Program - Hi Evan Have you ever thought about inserting a "Referred by" field into the forum sign up process? This field could help track the sign ups that have resulted directly from a forum member inviting someone to join. Under the user profiles you could also include a "Number of referrals" field that shows how many members a particular user has referred to the forum. You could then run a competition every month for the highest number of referrals but then again you would prefer quality not quantity. What do you think?


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