January 19, 2016
Generating Referral Sales Starts with Doing Great Business
BY John Paul Narowski IN Sales and Marketing 0 Comment
Unlike most big CRM companies, karmaCRM doesn’t have a enormous marketing budget and a 30 person sales team. We’re a small business, just like our userbase, and we have the small marketing budget to go along with that designation. This just means our marketing tactics and lead generation channels have to be a bit different than your average CRM company. That’s why we’re proud to say one of our most dependable lead generation sources is word of mouth marketing.
That’s right. Word of mouth.
Over the past quarter, we can trace nearly a 25% of our leads to word of mouth sources. Our amazing users are telling their friends, colleagues, and network about karmaCRM and those people are signing up and becoming users themselves.
In this blog post we’re going to share with you how we generated those word of mouth leads by doing great business and building strong relationships and how you can do the same.
Be a Joy to Work With
People will talk about and evangelize your brand when you’ve been able to build amazing relationships with them. Whether you’re a tiny startup out of Denver, a one man business consulting practice, or a 10,000 employee corporation, customers love to feel connected with your company and your brand. At karmaCRM this idea of building relationships starts as soon as you sign up for our platform and is a staple of our customer happiness strategy.
The first step in being a great business partner and a joy to work with is great communication. At karmaCRM, this means when you email our support or sales team, or submit a ticket, you can rely on our team responding within 12 hours at the longest and most likely within a hour. For business consultants, this means clear communication that lets your client know exactly what they need to know, and timely communication that gets your client the information they need when they need it. In our experience, the very first sign that a client relationship isn’t going to be fruitful is a lack of communication.
Without a system to track when you need to communicate with a user or client you are doomed to forget. That’s where you’ll need a CRM like karmaCRM that allows you to set, manage, and be reminded of followups via text message or email.
Challenge your clients to be the best they can be
Often times, disrupting how a client goes about their business can be what sets you apart in their mind when they get an opportunity to refer you. This doesn’t mean insulting or tearing down your clients business, but it does mean challenging what has become their status quo. Our sales team is constantly gathering data, articles, and industry insights to share with our userbase. By putting the most relevant and educational information in front of our users, we challenge them to take the insights they have gained and apply them to their business.
We recently challenged a user who steadfastly believed none of his clients would be willing to refer him to their network with a Texas Tech report which states that 83% of satisfied customers would be willing to refer a product or service to their network. He decided to give asking clients for referrals a shot and was able to gather eight leads and eventually three additional clients in about an hours worth of time spent.
That user has since become a karmaCRM power user and has referred us countless times. Disrupting his mindset and challenging him to be a better business owner made karmaCRM standout as the most memorable CRM he has used. From there, we simply asked him to keep us in mind when asked what his CRM of choice was.
Be the referrer before being the referee
We are continually asked by people in our network and karmaCRM users how they can improve their business and who they should be talking to in order to get the advice they need. Luckily, karmaCRM is a great platform for business coaches, so we have countless business coaches that we can refer.
When we refer someone in our network to a karmaCRM customer, we make sure we send either a introduction email or a friendly note letting the business consultant or coach know that we have referred them. Not only do we love doing this for our users, but they are VERY likely to make sure to then return the favor and refer karmaCRM.
Referral sales comes down to building relationships by going above and beyond your user’s, client’s, or customer’s expectations. Whether you are challenging your client with valuable information or referring them to someone in your network, always remember to go above and beyond.
Next week we’ll be diving into how to make the ask and dissecting the different ways you can request referrals from your users and clients. In the meantime we’re interested to hear from you guys! How do you set your clients up so you can ask them for referrals? Let us know in the comments below!
