[E21] Referral Week: Ultimate Indicator

Welcome to Week 5 of The Sales Experience Podcast and the beginning of Referrals Week.

“Wait…we have only just covered the Fundamentals. I need some strategies and tactics first before I care about referrals!!!”

If you are thinking this, you are correct – there are a lot of sales related topics to cover before thinking about referrals. If you cannot close deals then there won’t be referrals.

Right?

Yes and No.

While it might seem to early on to talk about Referrals the topic is actually very important for the beginning of this podcast, the beginning of your sales career, or if you are a veteran salesperson and want to take your professional success to the next level.

A salesperson who focuses on referrals and can actually be successful just from those referrals has reached the pinnacle of a sales career.

But in order to do that you have to be intention before you even talk to prospects and close deals.

In this first episode, I will set the groundwork for why a referral-based sales business is the Ultimate Indicator that you are providing the best Sales Experience possible.

Episode 21 – Transcript

Welcome to Episode 21 of The Sales Experience Podcast. My name is Jason Cutter, with you as always on this journey to change the landscape of how sales is done. This is the start of the fifth week of the podcast, hopefully you are getting value from the topics I have been covering. We started out a little slow, setting expectations. Then moved to as much mindset stuff as I could cover in the episodes during week 2. I will tell you, that one was tough to keep it so short, high level, but also impactful. Same thing for weeks 3 and 4 where I covered the fundamentals. Those are literally hour long courses that I teach but I promised you short episodes that you can listen to, digest, and put into use right away.

So here we are at week 5, which you already saw is Referrals Week. This might seem like an odd topic so early on. There is a ton more sales related things to cover. We still haven’t touch the surface of selling skills, customized sales strategies by behavior type, scripting, marketing, technology, and so on. So why would I want to spend this week talking about referrals when we have a lot to cover to help you even close more deals? Does it seem like I am putting the cart before the horse – can’t get referrals without closing deals…so we need to cover how to close more deals first, right?

Yes and No. Yes, you need to close deals for people to send you referrals. Actually…that’s not true – but I will cover that in a different episode this week on how to get referrals from people you don’t sell to – and I don’t mean asking your family and friends.

The reason I want to cover referrals this week is that receiving referrals is the ultimate indicator. Receiving referrals should always be your focus. In fact, your true goal as a sales professional should be to have referrals be your only source of deals you close. Not cold calling, door knocking, new inbound leads, random website form fills, not people walking onto the lot. 100% referral business.

If you are a manager or owner then of course you want nothing more than your entire sales team to be closing all referral sourced deals. It makes total business sense, which you already know, but I will cover in another episode.

But why do I call the referral the Ultimate Indicator? Because a referral is the outward sign that things went well with what your company promised that customer or client.

When the prospect sees your marketing or branding, calls in or walks into your store, there is an expectation in their mind based on what they saw, read, or heard. There is a promise already being made. Then they get to you – the salesperson. You, hopefully, are a continuation of that expectation and promise of what your product or service will do for them. Then they pay your company and the fulfillment begins. Maybe they receive your product in hand or in the mail, maybe they drive off the lot with that car, or they get access to the service you provide, or you start working on their debt or get them set up with insurance.

This is where the rubber meets the road, as they say. If your marketing and sales and fulfillment are in alignment, then the customer will be satisfied. Their fears of what could have happened and what they were worried would happen as a result of having to deal with a sale person did not occur. Instead they got what they wanted and were promised.

Satisfied clients aren’t enough though, which I will cover in another episode as well. For now let’s stay on the topic of referrals being the Ultimate Indicator. When everything goes right, the customer is satisfied, or ideally – a raving fan as Ken Blanchard describes them – then referrals will be generated.

A referral is the single best indicator that your company did what it said what it would do for that person. It indicates that the sales rep was honest, professional, and set the right expectations. It indicates that the customer trusts your company.

At the company, ownership and management level, a salesperson on your team who is generating referrals means that they and you are performing above the customer’s expectations. At this point you can almost throw away all of your other KPIs – key performance indicators. The number of calls they take, their closing percentage, their customer satisfaction scores, their pipeline follow up – unimportant. If your rep is generating referrals and is meeting their performance requirements just off referrals, then that means they are doing everything else really well.

If you are a salesperson and you are generating referrals, that means the prospects you converted into customers see you as more than just a salesperson. They see you as the person who helped them improve their life in some way, make a change, buy that thing – whatever it was, big or small. You improved their life, even in the smallest ways, and you did it the right way. You went against their biggest fears of dealing with a salesperson. You didn’t do what they were worried about. Instead you asked questions, actually listened, and sent them on the right path. You blew their mind which resulted in them wanting to tell everyone they knew about you. Then, to top it off, the things you promised them, your company actually did!

When you are closing referral deals, especially if you can do that more than closing new leads, then it is the ultimate indicator that you are a sales professional.

And the reason that I am focused on Referral Week this early on in the podcast, before getting to all the other sales topics we could cover, is that you want to get your mind focused on generating referrals. You might be new to sales, or with a new company and just starting out with no pipeline. Or maybe you are a seasoned veteran looking for ways to improve your sales skills. Who ever you are listening to this, shift your mind to what you would need to do or say with each prospect to get them to become not only a client but someone who is so happy that they are a referral generating machine.

When you do that, you can reverse engineer the rest of your process to build it in such a way where it will take your prospects on the ideal sales experience.  Like Field Of Dreams – if you build it they will come. If you build your sales process with referrals in mind, the referrals will happen. If you aren’t intentional about generating referrals, then you might still get some from time to time, but not enough to live on.

That’s it for this episode. If you would like help with how to build your sales process such that you generate more referrals, go to www.cutterconsultinggroup.com and send me a message. I also have other resources there, and make sure that you listened to all the episodes during the two fundamentals weeks. If you follow those five basic fundamental sales principals, you will be well on your way. Until next time, always remember that everything in life is sales and people will remember the experience you gave them.