How to avoid over reliance on referrals

If you're an expert-led business and you’re selling high value services, it is the easiest thing in the world to slip into an over reliance on referrals.

If you only need a few clients per year and each client is a long term relationship, you can go for years without ever needing to market or sell yourself.

Referrals are easy to close compared to marketing leads and so it’s easy to neglect that in favour of leads which by comparison are red hot.

But there is also something dangerous that happens to organisations which are built on word of mouth and referrals - they lose touch with their market.

Think about it, if leads come to you from a client intro - your client is the one who explained the value and pre-sold you.

Markets change and buying motivations change - so over time as you get more and more warm intros, the pre-selling work - the messaging that got people interested you’re detached from.

I’ve seen this first hand working with clients. One client of mine had 15 years of word of mouth and warm intros - but then found many of their network started to move out of the industry or retire.

I was doing a strategy day with them and when I was asking them questions about their customers' needs, not only was there a difference between the leadership team about who their clients were and why they buy. When we did market research, we got completely different answers.

Their marketing was basically speaking to customer needs back in 2015.

So, how do we end reliance on referrals?

Commit to a sales and marketing process - If you’re not in an urgent need it is easy to say you’re committed, but that commitment doesn’t translate into a commitment to action. 

Define your proposition

Who you want to work with, why they need you, what problems you solve and your process to solve it - this is not just to put in a nice document, out of this comes your entire strategy. This is a strategic decision to focus on specific service areas and types of client. When I consult with clients they often struggle because they’ve worked with such a varied clientbase and it feels uncomfortable to constrict the marketing focus. But this is how you breakthrough in a very noisy world. Your target audience are being bombarded by marketing and sales messages from every angle and they’ve learned to auto-filter by relevance and personal importance. 

This means for us to efficiently land with them, we need to be hyper relevant to their situation. The more wide you go, the border and less relevant you become.

Start pre-selling

You need to get in front of those target audiences and they need to see you multiple times to know, like and trust. Despite what you may be told online, people don’t buy from one LinkedIn post or one email - it’s a journey of know, like and trust.

This is where your 5P’s come in, these are the basis of your marketing strategy:

• The promise of a better future, that you can get them to a place they want to be.
• The problem you solve, not a concept, not an abstract "clarity" you solve what they are dealing with.
• The person you're speaking to, them. They need to explicitly see you help them.
• Proof you've got results for people like them before. Case studies, testimonials and successes.
• Your process and methodology to get that result. Your process to get from problem to end destination.

Build your pipeline.

The next step is then to get leads and convert them. I use a process called LAPD.

Your sales process has 4 distinct stages.

• Leads - Acquiring interest from your target audience.
• Appointment - Getting calls with your leads in the diary.
• Propose - Explaining how your service can meet their wants and needs.
• Deal - proactively managing the lead through to a close.

This is a system and shouldn’t be “winged” - by building out a solid proposition and focusing on one segment of your addressable market, you can make this process efficient, effective and scalable. 

Then, once this is delivering, you can expand out to other markets and service areas.

When I work with a client, we can usually get this whole system running and delivering in 90-days (depending on deal size).

How I help you

The goal isn't to stop asking for referrals. It's to build a second source of demand that you control. LinkedIn is one of the best places to do that, where else can you reach 1.3 billion people?

Done well, it means you can:

• Find exactly the right audience quickly.
• Build trust, credibility and visibility without spending hours a day on it.
• Win clients consistently, without relying on referrals alone.

It comes down to three things working together: your proposition, your pre-selling and your pipeline. This is how I help executive coaches, professional services firms, advisers, consultants and technical founders build them:

• Get clear on your goals and the number of clients you want to win.
• Proposition: sharpen your positioning so the right people understand your value and find it easy to buy.
• Pre-selling: build trust through your profile and content, so prospects arrive already trusting you.
• Pipeline: create a simple, repeatable flow of leads, conversations and clients.

No paid ads. No pushy tactics. No posting every day.

Most clients launch within 30 days (depending on your bandwidth) and start seeing leads in the first 60.

If you'd like my coaching and support to build this, schedule a call here.