How to Get Others Referring to You

Vision Alliance | How To Get Others Referring To YOu

How would you like to get twice as many new customers for 1/3 the cost of anything you’ve ever done before – or even for FREE? If that sounds like pie in the sky, please find a quiet spot and read this article very carefully. You are about to learn one of the most effective ways to get new customers, extra sales and leads for your business. In today’s economic climate, in fact in any economic climate, people are very cautious about dealing with strangers. This means, that no matter how good your product or service, you have to overcome 2 major hurdles.

1. You have to convince the purchaser that your product or service is what they really need and want.
2. You have to assure them that your company will deliver as you promise. In other words,that they can trust you

To some extent you may overcome these hurdles with a money-back guarantee or some sort of a free trial. However, you’ll do far, far better if you…STOP TRYING TO DO BUSINESS WITH STRANGERS. Let’s face it. It’s hard. It’s expensive, and it can be draining on you and your staffs’ energies. After all, to win the trust of a person who doesn’t know you takes time and effort. And at the end of it all, you still can’t be sure if you’ll get their business or not.

However, having the trust of a person is crucial if they are going to buy from you. That’s why the easiest sales are to people who have already bought from you, or referral business.

When you get introduced to a prospective client from someone who is known by the prospect the other person is more likely to listen to you and give you a chance to sell yourself and what you have to offer. You may wonder, “Why would another business want to introduce me and what I’m selling?” There are a number of reasons why someone may want to recommend you.

  1. They may recommend you if you have given them value far and beyond what they expected and they like you and your product.
  2. Maybe they’ll do it because they want you to introduce them to your customers.
  3. Maybe they’ll do it because if their customers buy your product, they’ll then need more of their product as a result. This is especially true if you show your customers how to grow their business and get more customers. As they grow, you get more business from them.
  4. They may do it because you pay them to introduce you or you offer them a ‘bribe’.
  5. Or they may do it because they know their customers will want your product or service and that they’ll get goodwill and thanks from their customers for letting them know about it.

Let me share a very important fact with you… Every single person you want to reach, is already someone else’s customer. Which means they are buying products and services similar to what you offer. Providing that the business they are buying from is doing a good job, these customers will trust a recommendation from that business.

Getting someone else to refer to you is not as easy to put into practice as it sounds.You see,the business owners who may want to introduce you are very busy people. Introducing your business is never going to be as important for them, as it is for you. So what you have to do is to make it so easy for them that they can’t possibly refuse you. How do you do that? To make the introduction easy for them and effective for you, you are going to have to provide the email or letter and the promotional collateral (brochure etc) for them to send. All they have to do is put copy and paste the letter into their email, attach your information and press send.

There are also programs out there such as affiliate and referral partner programs that can also track your referral partner activity. This is not necessary however a great idea especially if your volume of referrals start to increase rapidly and if you are selling products regularly that way referral fees can be easily and effortlessly calculated.

next time you want someone to start referring to you, try thinking about how you can make it easy for them. Write the intro letter for them, collate your introduction information / presentation pack that’s brief and displays the benefits of why someone would want to do business with you and then of course be sure you have a great offer for the new prospective customer to “try you out”.

Would you like some help with this in your business?  Why not book a Complimentary Business Growth Session with one of our Coaches?  Connect with us here.

The 6 D’s of E-mail Management

This article is based on a portion of an Expert Interview with Laura Stack, author of “Leave the Office Earlier.” and is also based on personal experience.

How many items are on your to-do list? And how many of those will you actually cross off today?

Time management and planning are foundational to personal productivity, yet many people don’t approach each day with a plan, and as a result end up wasting valuable time in a reactive mode. Others at least have a to-do list, but typically attack the easy items first, which means the important items don’t get done very fast!

Of course, one of the big enemies of personal productivity today is e-mail. The constant flow of e-mail alerts during the day can destroy your concentration and cause you to flit from one project or crisis to the next. But you do not have to work in this state of e-mail-induced ADD.

Let’s face it, most e-mails are not that important. And almost none require you to drop everything. Set the expectation that you will respond within 24 hours, then live up to that standard. You can do this by setting a time to look at your e-mail twice a day, say every four hours. But first you have to break the e-mail addiction. The key is to turn off all your alerts if you are using Outlook for example or if you are like our company and have made the switch to the Cloud and are using Google Apps, it’s as simple as working from your calendar and Tasks list rather than your email.
Your next step is to be disciplined about looking at your e-mail for a half hour or so twice a day, and ruthlessly applying the six Ds of e-mail management: Learn how to control and manage your emails rather than allowing them to control and manage you.

 

Let’s take a closer look at the six Ds of e-mail management:
Discard it. This one’s easy. Make a snap decision and hit the delete key. Before you hit the delete key you may wish to “unsubscribe” from future mailings to ensure you eliminate the time spent on hitting delete.

Delegate it. Can someone else handle it? Is the email for someone else? Simply forward it with a quick note, and then move it to a personal folder (see below for more on personal folders).

Do it. If you can handle it in three minutes, do it and be done with it. You won’t have to come back and mentally process it again, which is a victory.

Date it. This is for e-mails that you need to reply to, but can’t right now. Many people get stuck here, but there’s a simple remedy if you know your software. In Outlook and also in Google Apps for Business, for instance, you can automatically convert an e-mail to a to-do item. It’s a great way of allocating specific time to responding to the email as an formal task in your workday.
Drawer. For personal e-mails or things that don’t require any action but you don’t want to delete, simply move to a specific folder so you can access or review another time.
Deter. This is for the stuff that makes you ask “Why am I getting this?” So take the step of adding the sender to your blocked senders list, or unsubscribe, or set up a rule that says anytime something comes from this address, it’s going into the trash or some specific folder.

There you have it – a simple system for defeating the tyranny of e-mail and taking back your personal productivity. Try it, you’ll be surprised at how much more focused you will be, and how much more you’ll get done.