How to get more clients to recommend you, more often

How to Get Your Clients to Recomend You More Often

During this Podcast I am going to cover:

1. Why most referral strategies fail and why just asking doesn't work
2. The three conditions that must be in place before a client will refer you
3. How to build a referral system which runs without you having to chase it
4. The exact words to use when asking for a referral naturally and confidently
5. How to reward referrals in a way that encourages repeat behavior

Steve

If you want to know more from me and you want to benefit from nearly 30 years of experience helping thousands of businesses in hundreds of industries all over the world and the time that I've spent learning from the worlds leading masters in the world of sales and marketing, the next step for you is to book a one-to-one meeting with me and you can do so by going to resultsmastery.com thanks very much for listening.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:33

Hello and welcome to the Results Mastery live stream. Whether you're listening live to me now, on LinkedIn, uh, YouTube, Facebook, or perhaps you're listening on my podcast. But either way, it's great to have you here. My name's Steve Mills, and today we're going to be talking about what I believe is one of the most powerful forms of marketing in the world, and probably always has been in over 30 years that I've been helping and advising businesses in terms of how to grow their business, how to do it without spending a fortune on marketing, and how to achieve an average of 45%. That's not been a goal, that's been the result that I've achieved. I've worked with over 10,000 businesses in a whole variety of different industries, and on average, they've got a 45% return on uh increasing and growing their business. So if that's of interest to you, feel free to get in touch. You can see my website scrolling along the bottom here, and uh you'll be very happy if you want to book a free no obligation meeting with me using one of the goal buttons on the site. So that's advert over. Let's press on with some real value uh in terms of helping you. Um, if you've got any questions, uh feel free to uh add them to the chat. I'll attempt to answer any questions at the end. And uh we're gonna be here for I don't know, 10-15 minutes, something like that. I don't want to keep you for hours. Uh so this is a quick little sound bite, really, a a tip or a series of tips. So, first thing, let's have a look at what we're talking about then. How to get more clients to recommend you. And the first thing I want to say is that let's just take a hundred clients. So I don't know how many you've got. You might have 10, you might have a hundred, you might have a hundred thousand. It doesn't really matter. What matters is the percentage, which is what we're gonna look at right now. So I'm gonna say just uh to start with, you might have a small percentage who wouldn't recommend you. You know, nobody's perfect, including myself. And you know, there might be 1%, 2% of people who, for whatever reason, you know, things didn't go uh according to plan or whatever, and they wouldn't recommend you. So let's put those people aside because we want to be focusing on the people who do, and even more importantly, the people who would. Um, because typically what tends to happen is you've got a whole variety of people who do, they tend to be about 10-15%. Let's call it 10% for now. Uh, 10% of your people uh do, and therefore, uh, if you took the 2% plus the 10%, that means 88% of the people who could give you a recommendation um don't. So what are you gonna do about it? Just let let it happen. You know, a lot of people tell me that, oh yeah, we win most of our business from referral, from word of mouth. And when I ask, oh, tell me, what sort of system do you have in place to do that? They look at me a little bit gone out and they say, Well, I don't really have a system, please, uh Steve. We uh we do a good job and and people will recommend us, and that's true, they will. Uh, by the way, they'll also recommend you if you do a bad job, they'll recommend don't ever use in that company. So, you know, we need to make sure fundamentally that we're doing a good job. So, um, why is um recommendation so important then? Uh well, it it costs nothing, costs nothing to get recommended. It they convert very, very highly. So if somebody's recommended you, there's a much increased chance of turning that into a client than it is if it came from, say, Google Ads or something like that. You know, they'd clicked on your advert on Google, gone to your website, had a little nosy round, and maybe made an inquiry. Um, that those inquiries are great, by the way, but they're not as powerful as uh word of mouth. So uh just just think about that for uh a few minutes. So once you know your numbers and what they're like right now, the next thing you need to know is your conversion rate and what are you going to do to improve it. So, if at the moment, as I suggested, it's 10%, you know that. Um, what we need now is to think about how to do more. And the number one way is really simple. It's to ask. As they say, if you don't ask, you don't get. And ask and you shall receive, uh, is another saying that we hear uh fairly often. So if you don't ask, you don't get, is really, really true. So uh the next question is then what are you gonna say when you ask? Because you know, if you if you just ask, you know, if I go up to my clients and go, Oh, hi, Steve here. Uh, just wonder whether you knew anybody who'd be interested in my service. What's the standard answer to that? Do you think? It's something like, uh, well, not at the moment, Steve, but if I do, I'll certainly let you know. Yeah, I'll let you know. That's a little bit like when you go into a shop and the shop assistant comes up to you and says, Uh, can I help you? And you say, uh, no, thanks, I'm just looking. Why do they say that? Why don't they try and test saying something different? You know, I uh what is it you're interested in today? Uh, are you looking for anything special? You know, something different to get a different result. Because we're programmed in our brains to go when somebody says, Can I help you? We say, No, thanks, just looking. So, what we need to do as far as uh referrals concerned or word of mouth concerned, is to say something different than I was wondering whether you knew anybody else who'd be interested in buying my service or words similar to that, buying my stuff. You know, we've got to be better than that. Now, having said that, that's better than saying nothing at all, which is what 80 to 90 percent of businesses do anyway. They just do a good job and hope uh that somebody will give them some business. Now, hope is not a strategy, hope is uh almost hopeless, you know, and it's not gonna improve and it's not gonna get any better. So uh we can ask. I'm gonna talk to you in a couple of minutes about what to say. I've said what maybe you don't say, I'll talk to you about what you say. But before I do that, I'm gonna talk about another opportunity, uh, and that is to incentivize. Yeah, I'm talking about bribery. Yeah, that's basically what we're saying. We're saying give people something in order to get something. So if you give me a recommendation, what can I give you? Well, there's a whole variety of things. I could give you a discount, I could give you a free session, I could give you a bottle of wine, I could pay for a weekend at a hotel, I could give you a uh uh, I don't know, a bottle of champagne with you know chocolates and whatever. I can give you stuff, and that's okay, and I quite like that, and I've definitely done that in the past, and uh we'll probably do it again in the future. However, uh, let me just tell you for openness, what I do is we donate £100 to cancer research if you recommend somebody who uh then later becomes a client. And I love the fact that we do that. We've donated over six and a half thousand pounds to cancer research in 100 pound chunks. That's pretty cool, isn't it? You know, and uh who'd who's gonna be upset? Who's gonna think, oh, he's trying to bribe me? No, most people uh sadly have been touched in one way or another by this dreadful disease called cancer, and most people would be quite happy for uh to recommend me and then know that I've given an amount of money to cancer research. So, you know, we really want to do that, and uh I I think uh asking is important, and asking and incentivizing people uh can be even more important. So let me go back to what to say. I'm gonna start by saying, you know, there's no perfect script, there's no, you know, perfect way of doing this. All there is is the numbers. Okay, we've got to see if what you what I'm going to tell you now works for you. Because if it does, great, that'll get you more business. And if it doesn't, then test it, change it, adapt it, improve it, measure it until we get to what we want. First thing we've got to think about is opportunities. How are we going to get opportunities to ask people? Well, there's an argument that says whenever you meet them. Now you don't want to overdo it, you know, if you're seeing people every day, you don't want to ask them every day, obviously. But you know, um, if you if you meet your clients physically or on Zoom uh or another, you know, online uh video-based um uh service, then you know that's great. Go ahead and uh you know ask them on on there. The the other time I'd say, and I think this is a really big one, is to do what I call a customer service phone call. So it goes something like this. Oh, hi, it's Steve Mills here. I'm calling uh from Results Masteries, part of our customer service, uh, just to make sure that you're 100% happy with everything we've been doing uh for you uh during the last quarter. And and again, dependent on what they say, if they say, Well, there's a bit of a problem with this, it's a great opportunity to fix it. If they say, No, it's you've been great, Steve, really, really good, then you've got to ask uh three questions. Uh, sorry, you've already asked one question, you know, are we happy? The second question is, who do you know? And the third question is, is there anything else that we could do to help you even more? Because that's a this customer service call becomes actually an opportunity to sell something, to get a referral, and to confirm whether they're happy or not. So let's go into the script. I'm gonna do like a two-part um uh role play, if you will. So I I phone up and I say to you, um, oh hi, Steve Mills here from Results Mastery. I'm just calling as part of our customer service to make sure that you're a hundred percent happy with everything that we do. You're then gonna say, Yeah, it's been great, Steve. We've been with you three months now, really, really happy. So, assuming you say that, I would then say, Thanks. I wonder whether you could do me a really big favor. Chances are they're gonna say what? They're gonna say, Yeah, yeah, sure, if I can. Well, to be honest, we win a lot of our business from word of mouth, from satisfied clients like yourself. And I was wondering, I know you've been in business how long now? 15 years. Oh wow. So you must have met a lot of people, you must have clients yourself, suppliers, contacts, people you network with, and so on and so forth. Well, would that be true? Yeah, that's true, Steve. Yeah, yeah, I do. So, out of all those people that you're thinking of, who do you think would be the top four people that we could help in the same way that we've helped you? Could you think of those? Yeah, I can, Steve. Yeah, I I I can think of uh four or five people actually that I think you could help. Brilliant. Who are they? What are their names? What are their email addresses? What's their contact details? Now that's when you shut up, right? You get them to talk. They're either going to give you the name or they'll say, Well, I'll email them over or whatever. And once they've done that, you're going to say, Well, thank you ever so much. One final thing would it be okay to use your name uh when I call them? Is that okay? Because without that, it's not it's just a lead and it's not a genuine referral. Uh, that helps you get past the gatekeeper when the gatekeeper says, Um, I say Steve Mills, could I speak to Fred Bloggs, please? They say, What's it about? Oh, yeah, Sam Smith asked me to give him a call. All right, okay, I'll put you through. Doesn't always work like that, I know, but it's more likely to work like that if you've got that name of that person that you can use that Fred Bloggs knows. And uh, and and that I think is is a really, really good script. It's something I learned many, many years ago. And I think you if you phoned those 88 people and you maybe did, I don't know, 10 a day, something like that. So over the next nine days, so let's call it two weeks, five day five-day week, Monday to Friday, I reckon that's gonna be worth if you're a almost a startup business, um, and you've got you, I mean, here we're talking about clients, but they could also be prospects. If you're a startup business, I reckon that's good could be worth, I don't know, 10 to 40 grand in new business. If you're an established business with perhaps uh you know over a hundred clients, um, that could be worth two, three, four, five hundred uh uh thousand pounds. Who knows? Now, there's no guarantees with this, but as I said to you at the beginning, what's it cost? It costs nothing, you know, it costs nothing. Lead capture cost is nothing, it's just a matter of going and asking. So uh go and do it. That's what's gonna get results. Not you know, hoping. What's gonna get results is taking action uh always. Okay, so that's about it for now. As I said, if you'd like a um a meeting, feel free to uh book a meeting with me, get yourself signed up. Uh, look forward to speaking to you soon. Um and uh don't forget I'm do I do these every uh normally every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. But this week I'm doing Monday, Tuesday, and Friday. So um don't forget to sign up, don't forget to come along. Uh, thank you for doing so, and I look forward to speaking to you on my next live stream. Thanks very much for listening.