In the blog post ‘Are Your Sales Techniques 100 Years Old?’ we demonstrated that common sales practices like – features, advantages and benefits, objection handling, closing skills, and open and closed questions – were all the rage in sales training classes of 1914! We have no dates on when the following lead generation practices came into play, but my guess is that it was long before 1914! Substantially before.
But despite being around forever and ever, I just don’t see these lead generation techniques happening consistently with the delegates on my sales training courses. And as you hear me say so often, the easy part is learning the techniques, the hard part is doing them consistently. So we’ll work on that bit too!
Here’s the golden nugget. Your existing users have potentially 5 fantastic sources of leads for you:
1. Their external peer group
2. Their internal peer group
3. Their geographical neighbours
4. Their suppliers
5. Their customers
Be honest have you covered off all of these with your existing customers? If not, and times are lean, maybe its time to get back on the phone and ask for some leads or some referrals. Working with LinkedIn, you can often check their peer group contacts out in advance, so you can make some helpful suggestions.
Why ask? You should be asking every customer with no exceptions. If you don’t, you’re leaving an extremely rich source of business on the table for your competitors to take. In my experience people enjoy the increased status and influence that comes from putting two businesses in contact with each other. There’ s no logical reason not to ask for leads, I don’t really think that’s the problem to be solved here. The main reason that I see for the lack of consistency in asking for leads is timing. When should we ask the customer and just as importantly how do we remember to do so?
When do you ask? Think more about where the customer is in the purchasing process, than where you are in your pipeline building process. The customer will likely feel most comfortable referring you when they have actually placed an order. But I think that another opportunity is when the customer is excited about your offering, maybe at the start of the purchasing process, so a soft approach to asking for leads could be used then too. For example, “Do you know others that could benefit in the same way as you?”
How to remember? Prime the customer early in the purchasing process. I got this tip from the fabulous John Jantsch over at ducttapemarketing.com. Say to your customer when you first engage, “You’re going to be so happy with what we do for you, that you’ll want to refer me to at least 5 of your contacts that have similar issues.” You can even put an incentive or reward in place, such as a discount, to help them buy into this. John’s book ‘Duct Tape Marketing’ is fantastic even for sales people.
Do You Want Leads or Referrals? What’s the difference? A referral is when someone warms up a potential contact for you and facilitates an introduction. A lead is more like a suggestion that may or may not ever turn into business at all. Now it’s clear that using your existing contacts will probably result in the former, which makes life better for you!
Conclusion: most, if not all, of the above is common sense. But I’m sure we can agree that it’s not common practice. Make it common practice and increase your sales by making lead generation and referral part of your pitch.
Article by Alistair McQuade
