Did you know that 80% of referrals turn into an actual meeting with a prospect? But only 11% of salespeople ask for referrals. In this episode, Joe and Tami talk about the importance of asking for referrals, tactics to earn referrals, assets you should share to get referrals, creating a process for earning referrals, and more!
Episode 27 Transcript:
Tami: Welcome to High Energy Marketing, a podcast with us the digital marketing agency Ajax Union, where we interview our CEO, Joe Apfelbaum, on key marketing topics and we share everything you need to know to grow your business online.
This is a question-and-answer podcast where I asked Joe questions about different topics and trends in marketing, based on his book, High Energy Marketing, you can get the book at Ajaxunion.com/book to follow along with us.
This is the 27th official episode of our podcast about High Energy Marketing. Today we’re going to discuss getting referrals.
But first, a little housekeeping. Wherever you are listening, go ahead and hit that subscribe button, so you get the next episode automatically. And if you can leave a rating or review, that would be amazing.
Let’s move on to the inspiration of the day. Joe, do you want to hit us with a quick inspiration minute before we get started?
Joe: Yes! Today’s inspiration: I want to talk about how mastery comes from repetition.
If you want to be great at something, you need to do it over and over.
When was the last time you did something for the first time? When you do it again and again, before you know it, you become a master.
I remember the first time I sat down to write a book, I was terrible at it. And by the way, I didn’t have AI then.
I told my coach, “I can’t do it.”
She said, “Joe, just write every day. And before you know it, you’re going to become a master at writing every day.”
The writing did not need to be great, but the act of writing made me great at writing.
Now I can knock out several thousand words in a day and feel really good about the impact I can make on the people in my life by communicating with them about how they can take their life to the next level.
The more you do something, the better you’re going to get at doing that thing.
Greatness doesn’t come as a talent. By the way, I think talent is overrated.
But greatness comes from a skill and skills are built with repetition.
I remember the first time I drove a car, I was fascinated by everything and everything was so difficult. But after doing it for 20 years, I don’t even pay attention. The car basically drives itself. I just get in the car and it drives everything happens. Someone on the road gets in my lane and my body moves the car out of the way.
How did it happen? It happened by repetition.
If you do things enough times, you’re gonna get great at it.
If you want to learn how to do anything, start by doing it often with consistency, and you’re going to be great. Mastery comes from repetition.
Tami: Thank you, Joe. Let’s jump right into our topic of the day: Getting Referrals From Your Clients and Prospects. We have a couple of questions for you.
How does one craft a winning referral strategy?
Joe: The way you craft a winning referral strategy is to figure out what type of referrals you want.
Did you know that 80% of referrals turn into actual meetings, but only 11% of people have a referral strategy or even ask for referrals?
Think about this: if you’re going to get referrals, you may as well get the right type of referrals.
Having a referral marketing strategy is actually going to help you get more referrals. And you only get referrals when people remember that you exist at the right time and you get that introduction that’s relevant.
Let’s say, for example, you are a commercial real estate broker in New York City. You must get referrals to win business. And if you’re not using social media consistently to stay top of mind, how are people going to remember that you exist?
You need to be sending out emails to your contacts and adding value to them so that they remember and think about you at the right time.
I believe that my clients and prospects need to be educated on how to send referrals and they need to be taught what an ideal client might look like and what triggers will help them understand the best time to offer an introduction.
Plus people are forgetful, so reminding them is helpful. If you’re a commercial real estate broker in New York City, you must train your contacts to offer an introduction when someone is mentioning how expensive their commercial lease is or if they’re expanding a new one, a new space.
So besides understanding the helpful triggers, it really does help to create assets as well.
Tami: Okay, and what assets can we share to get referrals?
Joe: Well, think about case studies, for example. Do you have case studies that you can share with your contacts that they can forward to another business relationship, a friend, or a family?
What about presentations? Do you have presentations that referral partners can watch?
We have a presentation right on our homepage. We ask our referral partners to send that presentation to their contacts or to at least one person in their network.
Our training company Evyrgreen offers an aggressive commission to our clients for introductions, and we have collateral and LinkedIn training for them to be able to start getting us more referrals.
We even run affiliate trainings monthly to invite our clients and friends to join to train them.
Then we have a bunch of different assets we give them we have social media assets, we have one pagers, we have decks, we have images, we have videos, we have a podcast.
I mean, this podcast that you’re listening to right now is one of the assets that we’ll ask our referral partners to send to their network so that they can hopefully look into doing work with our marketing agency, Ajax Union.
Tami: Yes, that is amazing. I love that double use of the podcast.
What are some different marketing tactics that we can use to get referrals?
Joe: Well, email marketing is very powerful. If you’re not using email marketing to get referrals, you’re missing out.
Another tactic would be social media. Are you posting on LinkedIn on a regular basis? Are you leveraging Facebook, Instagram, and Tiktok? If you’re not, you’re missing out.
Are you using WhatsApp? Are you staying top of mind with your network by setting up calls with them and educating them on how to be able to give you referrals?
You see, it is upon you to use these tactics and strategies to help you get more referrals because it’s not just going to happen on its own.
Tami: Right. And if you have a team that you want to be asking for referrals, how do you train your team to ask for referrals from their network?
Joe: Well, the first thing we do when we work with our clients is we say, “Let me see your script. What script are you using?” And maybe they’re not using a script, but if they are using a script, we’ll take a look at the script.
If they’re not using a script, then we’re going to say, “Where is your checklist? Let me see your checklist that you go through when you’re speaking to a customer when you’re doing customer service, when you’re finishing up a sales call.”
You know, the best time to ask for a referral is before a client actually buys from you. Or as they’re buying when they make a purchase they already bought into you. That’s the happiest they’re ever going to be. And so you ask them to make a referral right there.
Use specific language. You have to use specific language. So having a script out will be helpful.
Sometimes people ask for referrals and they use this. They say, “Hey, if you think of anybody that can use my services, would you send them my way?”
Then they say yes, and then never send you anybody.
A better way to ask for a referral, you can put this into a script, is saying, “Do you happen to know any real estate brokers in your network right now? Who do you know?” and use the word ‘who’ specifically.
“Who do you know that’s a real estate broker that lives in New York City?” They might say, “Well, I know three, Michael, Jack, and David.
“Would you be willing to make an email introduction between me and those three real estate brokers because I can really help them with X, Y, and Z?”
And then suddenly, they’re like,” Yeah, I’ll make that intro for you.”
Now you have three referrals because you use the word ‘who,’ and you use a specific target market in a specific geographic location.
So we train our clients on how to do this and we actually write the scripts up. We give you the collateral and build a checklist for you.
Tami: Exactly, so powerful.
I was going to ask you for some examples, but that’s exactly what I wanted to hear; those examples of how to do it, so specific.
It’s the same as when you’re searching for your target market on LinkedIn. You can’t just search for business owners. You have to search for dentists in the tri-state area whose business is over $500k in revenue or whatever.
So thank you so much, Joe. That was amazing information.
We hope everyone listening got as much out of this as we did.
On next week’s episode, we will be talking about marketing technologies: your favorite! You created a whole stack.
Make sure to hit that subscribe button to catch the next episode. You can follow us on all social @Ajax Union. Follow Joe on all social @JoeApfelbaum. To learn more about the podcast go to ajaxunion.com/podcast. If you have any questions, shoot us an email at amazing@ajaxunion.com.
Our music is by Michael Suarez and this podcast is produced by Sarah and Shannon.
Thank you so much for listening!
