Referrals marketing – ask for the referral! They are the #1 key for success
Referral marketing is a given because referrals are key to your business success. Always ask for them whenever you make a sale!
Let’s face it. Regardless of what anybody tells you, selling can be hard work, whether you’re doing affiliate marketing on the internet, or network marketing, or selling painted clay pots by the side of the road.
You have to get your products or services in front of people who are looking for your products or services and are willing to pay money to get them. This is where referral marketing comes in. Rather than looking blindly -aka, cold calling – ask an existing customer for a referral!
Now, I don’t know about you, but I like to get maximum bang for my efforts, which means I would rather get paid a lot more than minimum wage for my work. But if all I go for is lots and lots of traffic, I’m going to do a whole lot of work that I’m not getting paid for. Trust me; it can take a MASSIVE amount of un-targeted traffic to get one sale.
Why waste time?
Even when you work to get targeted traffic to your sales page, you can spend way more time than you need to getting that traffic. Just because your traffic is targeted does not mean you’re going to get a lot of sales. Targeted traffic from people who don’t know you is still going to be a hard sell.
I remember when I was selling insurance door-to-door. I had a low cost accident policy that would actually cover loggers for accidents in the woods. If you’ve ever checked out insurance, you would know how hard such a policy is to find. So when I was selling in a logging town, it was a really great policy to be offering! Most of my “traffic” was targeted!
But let me tell you; I still had to do a lot of leg work to sell a policy. People are naturally less trusting of strangers, and they were in no hurry to give their hard earned money to someone they had never even heard of. I had to do a lot of walking and a lot of knocking before someone would sit down and listen to what I had to offer.
But when I DID make a sale, that’s when the magic of the referral kicked in! Hint: Always ask for referrals when you make a sale!
Whenever I made a sale, I would ask my new clients if they knew of anyone who they thought would also benefit from this service. Most people who bought a policy LOVED giving me a list of referrals. Once I had this list, I could go directly to that person’s house and tell them that their friend had just recommended that I go and see them, because he thought they would probably also benefit from the service I had to offer.
What a difference having a referral made! The number of “clicks” went way up! Rather than going through entire blocks in a town full of really good prospects, I would go to a house and make a presentation (and usually a sale), then on to another house with the same results. Having referrals was almost like magic!
The same thing applies in online business, whether it is affiliate marketing, network marketing or direct sales of tangible goods. When you make a sale, always get the contact information of the person purchasing from you, and always ask for referrals. You will save hours of work and watch your sales explode.
Please leave a comment below and share your insights. People will thank you!
Dave Cottrell is opinionated, compassionate, and passionate about people, marketing and online business. He does a lot of digging, experimenting and research, and writes like crazy about a wide variety of topics and subjects. He is the owner of many websites and blogs; you can read his rants and find out more about him at https://www.davecottrell.com/ This article can be shared freely as long as this box remains intact. Copyright © 2019 David H. Cottrell. All rights reserved.
