With such a deluge of information assaulting your eyes, ears, and inbox each day, a quality personal referral is more powerful than ever before. It’s easy for your customers to search the internet for your product or service, they have a certain amount of skepticism about the information they find. While the information they surface in their research can be helpful, it’s often more persuasive and valuable to receive the thoughts and guidance of somebody they already know and trust.
This is especially true of the sales industry. A cold call or email to a prospect can get the ball rolling in a deal, but a solid referral from somebody they know and trust can ultimately give them the boost to see the true value you are trying to provide. Simply doing a bit more research and asking a few questions of prospects, sales reps can reap the rewards of referrals.
That’s why we invited Blanche Reese to this edition of Sales Tips to share three ways she actively leverages quality referrals.
Transcript
Hey everybody, Blanche here at Salesloft. Being in a modern sales society, we understand how important it is to get referrals. People trust people that they know a lot more than they trust a cold call or cold email. So today, I’m here to talk to you about three ways to leverage high-quality referrals.
The first tip I have is to make sure you’re reaching out to the right people. I wasn’t leveraging resources at all to get me referrals into the accounts that I was working until Jacob Vanderkooij came to our sales kickoff back in January and mentioned that the best time to ask for a referral is at anytime during the sales process. So now I’m reaching out on a cold call asking who else can benefit from this. On LinkedIn asking, hey, I noticed that you’re connected with so and so, or even on email to people who are current customers of Salesloft.
The second tip here is to make it as easy as possible for the person you’re reaching out to, to provide this referral. I recently found out that one of our prospects was connected with our VP of Sales, Derek Grant, and actually worked together at Pardot for a few years, so knew each other pretty well. What I was able to do, was use the draft on behalf of Feature to send him a draft of exactly what I want to say, and allow him to quickly get the request in his inbox. All he has to do is make any changes that he wants to make it in his own voice and simply press send.
The third and final tip here, is to give before you get. Oftentimes we come across customers and prospects, they’re asking for other solutions that are going to benefit their team, this can range from anything like call coaching software, to even a list builder. And of course, we don’t provide either of those functionalities, but we know a lot of companies that do that we trust. We’re more than happy to provide those names to the company that is asking for help. These are my three tips for leveraging referrals. I’d love to hear how you all are doing it as well. Feel free to comment on the blog, and again, thanks for tuning in. Have a great day, everybody!