10 Benefits of Having a Business Development Consultant Focused on Referrals
Jeffrey Tockman
Could your team ask for referrals more often, from better people, in a better way?
1. Maximize ROI with Cost-Effective Strategies
One of the most cost-effective ways to grow is referral-based business development. Unlike traditional marketing, which demands a good deal of advertising expenses, this style of marketing relies on deepening the existing relationships that you have already built. Higher rates of conversion can be expected, with better returns on investment, if the effort is more focused on existing customers and professional connections making referrals. Lifetime value often proves higher among referred clients, and they are more inclined to remain loyal, ensuring this method leads to long-term success.
2. Assessment
A business development consultant focused on referral strategy can assess the skills, goals, concerns, and action plans of current team members regarding generating referrals for your business. A third-party view of what you have in place provides new insights. Evaluating team members involves understanding their effectiveness in generating referrals, including communication skills, networking ability, and relationship management. Clarifying goals and concerns for referral generation helps align the team’s actions with business needs. Tailoring an action plan for each team member ensures they have the necessary resources and support to succeed in generating referrals.
Checking the available tools, systems, training plans, monitoring mechanisms, and accountability measures for referral generation will help identify areas for improvement. This assessment includes reviewing the CRM or database used for managing relationships with referral sources. An independent consultant specializing in referral strategy can offer valuable insights, make an impartial assessment, identify blind spots, and suggest ways to fine-tune the current referral strategy to enhance business potential. Many companies use the excuse of being too busy to improve their referral strategy, but a consultant can easily debunk this by demonstrating how crucial referral generation is to long-term success and providing practical strategies that integrate smoothly into the current workflow. By highlighting the potential ROI and efficiency gains from a well-executed referral strategy, the consultant can effectively motivate a business to take specific actions.
3. Written Business Development Plan
Write a plan that covers the strengths you have, the vision you want to achieve, the mistakes to address, and the actions you need to take for your business to grow. A written plan should clearly define how much accountability, motivation, encouragement, training, organization, moderation of meetings, and more are needed. With a good plan in place, resources like time are better utilized.
A referral-driven business consultant can help you identify your business’s strengths that make your business referrable, such as a strong reputation, satisfied client base, unique value proposition, or specialized expertise. More importantly, the consultant can document the strengths you and your team have in proactively generating referrals beyond the product/service you provide that makes you referable. The skills, tools, systems, language and steps to follow you already have in place are the foundation of the business development plan. Focusing on proactive referral generation rather than just being referrable and passively waiting for referrals to come will inevitably increase the quantity and quality of referrals your firm generates. Leveraging these strengths effectively is key to making your referral strategy work.
When setting goals you can express your vision for growth through referrals, including specifics like the number of new clients or customers you want to acquire through referrals, skills you want to acquire, revenue goals, or market expansion targets. This vision will guide your actions and keep you focused on business development.
Reflect on past experiences or mistakes related to generating referrals. Identify barriers or challenges that hindered your success. Mistakes, concerns, roadblocks, conflict, limited time available, limited financial support for referral strategy implementation, limited administrative support, disorganization, and negative emotions such as sadness, anger, fear, embarrassment, anxiety and regret can all hinder referral results.
Develop strategies to overcome challenges and reach your goals such as improving communication with current clients, refining referral sources, or enhancing your approach to asking for referrals. A consultant can help you identify specific actions that will grow your business through referrals. This might include setting up referral incentive programs, nurturing relationships with prospects and existing clients, or participating in networking events. Break these actions into manageable tasks with clear deadlines and assign them to team members.
In your business plan, outline how you will ensure accountability, motivation, support, training, and organization within your team. This might involve regular check-ins to assess progress, offering incentives or recognition for successful referrals, training on effective referral techniques, and systematizing the prospecting process along with tracking and reporting on referral activity and results. Determine, in writing, where a consultant can help you and update the document on a monthly basis. A well-defined plan will ensure that resources are used effectively and efficiently.
4. Database or CRM?System
Create a database or CRM for your prospects, current clients, past clients, and professional relationships. Capture robust information about your referral sources?—?who they know and their motivation and justification to refer you. Use the database to create a way to follow through systematically, with the right frequency. Without the system, time will continuously pass by, and referral opportunities may be missed.
Having all your contacts in one database or CRM system allows you to prioritize your efforts and customize your approaches for each contact. The CRM should contain detailed information about these contacts, including contact details, past interactions, preferences, and attached notes. Additionally, it should capture information on referral sources?—?who they are connected to and their reasons for referring clients to you. Understanding these reasons helps you nurture and strengthen these relationships.
A CRM will also help you systemize follow-ups, including reminders for follow-up calls or emails, scheduling regular check-ins with referral sources, and tracking the number of times you follow up. This ensures no potential referral gets missed.
Most importantly, investing in a database or a CRM system not only saves time through automation processes, such as follow-ups on emails and setting reminders, but it also frees up time that is really needed to build relationships and grow your business.
5. Customized Training
Develop a customized training curriculum that includes programs to help you as an individual or your team become more effective at generating more and better quality referrals. Keeping the best referral generators fresh and others starting to participate will help these people contribute to originating new businesses. Ongoing training stops your business from being like the lumberjack who is too busy to sharpen their saw.
Start by assessing the skills in your team and know the knowledge gaps associated with generating referrals. Highlight the areas where more training is needed, such as communication, building relationships, and the referral process. From there, you can design your very own training program to cover just what you or your team needs and how to achieve it. Other modules will include effective networking, developing client relationships, telling referral stories, the psychology of referral sources, and how to ask for those referrals. Tailor the resources so they are relevant, interesting, and action-provoking, and full of practical tips and techniques that can be used daily.
Larger teams can create train-the-trainer programs to enable key team members to become internal trainers and mentors. Those people can be specially trained to deliver a course on coaching their colleagues in some technique of generating referrals. Make the training scalable and give room for continued learning for the team. Recognize that learning never stops and make sure that provision is made for training and development regularly. Include refreshing courses, advanced modules, and skill enhancements for high achievers to hone their skills and others to enhance theirs. Such an investment in continuous training creates an environment for the development of continuous improvement and innovation. Thus, the team never becomes too busy to improve, ensuring competitiveness and long-term success.
6. Robust List of Questions
Prepare a list of customized open-ended contextual questions to ask your best referral sources in a logical progression. Share your intention with them before asking questions so the conversation flows more naturally and they will be more pleased to share details about their own strengths, goals, concerns, who they know, and their motivation to refer to you. Share your own perceptions, connections, and experiences with referral relationships to make them more comfortable to answer your questions about theirs. With the right questions, past clients, current clients, prospects, and professionals can all be better referral sources.
Tailor questions to the individual characteristics and preferences of your top referral sources: their industry, role, their relationship with your business, and past interactions. Such personalization indicates your commitment to developing a comprehension of the other person’s perspective and creates bonding. Design your questions as open-ended and contextual so that detailed information can be elaborated upon through a comfortably probing methodology: Instead of asking for yes-or-no answers, ask referral sources to describe experiences, thoughts, or insights. Contextual questions set the stage for what will likely be discussed, preparing the speaker and listener for the interaction. Order your questions so that they flow and build a relationship naturally. Start with open-ended general questions that set a foundation; then gradually develop the more specific questions around the areas you are interested in exploring. This way, your progression remains interesting, and you structure an exploration of the key topics.
Consider sending an outline of your conversations in advance to referral sources for context and to help them gather their thoughts on these important issues. This way, they will be able to think over possible responses before the consultation and, as a result, the conversation will go more smoothly. Providing questions in advance also helps to establish transparency and respect for their time and input.
Use questions to demonstrate real interest in the accomplishments, goals, concerns, and networks of your referral sources; use your questions to deepen relationships. Frame questions so their expertise and achievements are drawn out as ways for them to be genuinely appreciated for what they contribute. Essentially, let their answers highlight their own strengths. This builds trust and enhances their willingness to refer business to you.
7. Written Referral Stories of?Success
A referral consultant can help you write referral stories in a way that combats hesitancy, perception of risk, complacency, and reluctance of referral sources. Stories can show the benefit for the referral sources in your stories that lead them to have a reason or motivation to refer. Also, the stories would show the benefit you create for your clients/customers in your stories and in so doing, illustrate the justification to refer.
Great referral stories highlight why other people refer business to you. You motivate others by showcasing the benefits and rewards derived from sending referrals. Interactive stories interlaced with questions can capture these motivations so effectively, stressing not only the value for the referral source but also the value to the referral/prospect. Referral stories also build trust by showcasing your track record and abilities. Real instances of success and satisfied clients instill confidence in your abilities. An experienced business development consultant in referral strategies knows how to bring out success stories from you and your team that have the most impact. They collect the story points, create compelling storylines, and help you and your team to present the stories in such a compelling way that it will more deeply engage potential referral sources. Referral sources usually hesitate because they perceive some sort of risks involved. The success stories emphasize what the output or benefit is, thereby mitigating the risk to refer and even going beyond that to motivate a referral source into action.
8. Professionally-Moderated Events
A professional moderator/consultant can assist you with hosting a virtual event. You can meet business owners or professionals by being connected with them through referrals generated before, during and after the event. You can invite people who are already within your network who will come with others that you still might not know. The event itself becomes a referral strategy. A good person to moderate an event that you’re using to generate referrals is somebody who is an expert in referral strategy. Professionally moderated events can, therefore, allow you to engage with the population of business owners and professionals who are likely to become your high-quality referral sources and prospects. When the audience is controlled by you, and your network has been culled, you bring in those people who have connections to pass along and people who hold referral value. The consultant helps tailor event content and messaging in a way that resonates with the target audience in order to ensure engagement.
A referral strategy expert is able to integrate these tactics naturally into the format of the event. You increase the reach of your event?—?thus increasing the chances for qualified referrals through attendance. They can moderate panel discussions, networking sessions, issues discussion groups, roundtable meetings, or any type of structured event around making connections and referrals between participants.
An experienced professional moderator will really make a difference when managing your event. They can keep the conversation moving at the right pace in a positive direction, highlight you and your best connections during the event, handle the tech aspects, and leverage the interactive tools such as the chat panel, polls, Q&A, whiteboards, and more. This way, you can spend more time building relationships to maximize the potential of referrals for your business.
9. Moderated Professional Introduction Meetings
A consultant focused on referrals can facilitate discussions between you and your most important referral relationships, help you gain insights on how you can facilitate your own professional introduction conversations without the consultant, and uncover opportunities for you to receive more referral business and professional introductions.
10. Track Referral Activity and?Results
A referral strategist can help you and your team track the key activities like conversations held, introductions made, referral stories told, referrals requested, and new business commitment conversations held in order to see progress, identify gaps, and provide accountability. They can quantify results and ratios such as new connections and leads added to the database, new clients/customers acquired, and revenue/profit gains generated.