How’s your engine build going?
If you’ve been following our tips in the last few newsletters, you have:
— Made your business referrable across customer touchpoints
— Identified your referral partners
— Communicated clearly about your ideal customer
— Begun developing meaningful relationships with prospects and your strategic connections
— Primed your team to convert prospects to buyers
Now it’s time for the final phase: actively moving prospects through your sales funnel. This entails determining where your prospects are in the buyer’s journey first. Are they still shopping the competition? Have they begun interacting with your emails or social media posts? Did they request a consultation or product demonstration?
To help move prospects toward a sale, show them you understand their business and why they were referred to you. This is especially important because these are warm leads and you want to treat these referrals well to continue generating more of them. Let them know they are special to you because someone you both know referred them. Show your value to them—and conversely, that you value them as a potential buyer.
For example, share information about the products or services that benefit them and address their gaps or needs. Send them industry “insider” tips or proprietary educational materials they can use. Invite them to join your email list and receive periodic newsletters or pertinent announcements. Even if they don’t end up buying, they’ll have had a positive interaction with your company—and may become a referrer in turn.
Don’t forget to grease that referral engine by telling your sources about how you’re nurturing their leads and how it’s going. And be sure to always thank them for referring business to you. Appreciation in any form is another form of marketing!
Stay tuned! In the next edition, we will offer some easy-to-use tools to help you fine-tune your referral engine for maximum results.
Advantage Marketing can help you develop and power your referral engine for business growth. Contact us to learn more.
Don’t miss the previous articles in the Building Your Referral Engine series:
Part 1: 3 Important Building Blocks
Part 2: Warm up your pipeline
Part 3: Make it easy for others to make referrals
Part 4: Move prospects through your sales funnel
Special Offer! The Referral Engine Workbook
