SAP Business One partners – Build your own Referral Engine with new training program

It’s universally recognised that a prospect that comes to you from a referral is the easiest one to close – and has the lowest cost of sale. For many partners, referrals form up to 30% or more of their inbound leads and yet ,they have no formal process to encourage customers to provide referrals or manage the referral process.

For most, referrals happen accidentally as a result of doing good work or being in the right place at the right time.
What if those valuable referrals could happen intentionally, as a result of doing work and putting yourself in the right place, with the right source, always at the right time?
Marketing is the most important system in any business and referral generation is simply one component of the lead generation cog, and as such, needs it’s own documented system as well.

According to John Jantsch, the man behind Duct Tape Marketing, and author of the best selling book, The Referral Engine, the keys to a successful referral strategy include the following:

• Become more referable – before you pass go you must analyze every way that your business interacts with customers and prospects – marketing related or not – and inject positive, brand supporting elements into the each interaction – many referrals are lost because shipping or finance roughed up the relationship.
• Target your sources –
1) look at your customers under a microscope – what’s the profile of a customer that’s already referring business? Find that out and focus most of your attention on that kind of customer by making it easier for them to refer.
2) who else has your ideal customer as a target? Strategic partners should be a major focus of attention. This is the place where you need to look long and hard at your ability to make referrals to others – give and you shall receive!
* In a recent survey conducted on referrals respondents felt that less than 30% of their referrals came from strategic partners – I think that should be more like 60%
• Educate your sources – ever get a bad referral? It was probably your fault. We can’t or shouldn’t ask for referrals until we tell our referral sources in great detail – how they would spot our ideal customers, the kinds of things our ideal customer might say to signal them as a lead, and the exact way/words to use when telling a prospect about us.
• Motivate your sources – money for referrals is usually a poor motivation, but a creative, on message kind of offer that turns referring business to you into a game is a great way to motivate your referral sources and shine a light on the subject of referrals for all. Of course, saying thank you never hurts either.
• Follow-up with all – a referred lead is different, you’ve got to be prepared to follow-up in a different manner – in all likelihood the sales cycle will be different as well, plan on it. Follow-up also includes your referral sources. Build feedback loops so that your referral sources get to know how much good that are doing by referring your business. Create key indicators of referral success and make them part of your marketing measurement dashboard.
Each of these parts needs to be thought out, documented and baked into your day-to-day marketing efforts. Plan to change, expand and moderate your system parts as you take them out into the real world.

So these are the key components of a referral strategy, but how do you put these in place?
In this new on demand training course from small business marketing guru, John Jantsch, entitled Referral Engine Pro, available to SAP Business Partners, you will learn how to build a system in your business that makes referrals a key component of your marketing strategy and what you’ll need to do to make it work for you.

As a special Q3 offer to help you make referrals an even more important part of your business, SAP will cover the cost of attending this virtual training course for the first 50 SAP Business One Gold and Silver partners to register to participate in the training.

Those 50 partners will also have access to coaching in deploying the program from our own Authorised Duct Tape Marketing coach, Richard Duffy, so apply to attend this unique training program that will help you buld your marketing engine for Q3 and beyond.

To learn more about the program, watch this video and to sign up, please email me richard.duffy@sap.com with your details and I’ll let you know what you need to do to get started –