Colleen’s Blog

For the most part I have had nothing but extraordinary service while in the UK. These hotel and taxi practices are not difficult to replicate nor are they expensive to implement. They will encourage repeat business and increase profits from referrals. Why aren’t more service providers catering to customers in this way?

Are you actively seeking referrals from your current client base? According to recent studies, 78% of happy clients want to give out referrals. Yet only 8% of salespeople actually ask for them. Can you see the disconnect? It doesn't take a math genius to figure out that many salespeople are missing out on key opportunities to increase their sales and grow their businesses. I understand the intimidation factor, but the truth is in order to achieve and maintain any kind of success in sales, you have to push through the intimidation and ask for referrals anyway. They are such a powerful tool to grow your customer base, and not asking for them often enough is doing a huge disservice to yourself and your business. Here's the truth, you will always get a rejection if you're asking for referrals the wrong way. Just like anything else, being successful with gathering referrals requires strategy. <-- Click To Tweet Consider this quick strategy to get the ball rolling:

You may be surprised to learn that many salespeople and business professionals spend less than one hour a month prospecting for new business. One thing you must always keep in mind is that there is no sales problem that good prospecting skills can’t solve. Unless you’re rude or have a bad attitude (in which case you shouldn’t be in sales!), nurturing your pipeline consistently will lead you to sales success. I frequently coach sales reps who know exactly what to say, when to say it, and have terrific, well-priced products and services...but they still don’t sell. Why? Because they have no prospects waiting in their sales funnel! Simply put, if you have no prospects, you can’t make sales. <-- Click To Tweet To ensure that you are creating a steady stream of new business opportunities, here are a few tips that can help your prospecting and pipeline building efforts:

Have you ever lost contact with a client and wondered why? It’s easy to lose touch with people. We all have personal relationships that we wish we could maintain and nurture more often. But, when you allow your business relationships to fizzle out, it can have a negative impact on your career. Keeping regular contact with your clients is an essential practice for any successful salesperson. ← Click To Tweet How can you stay in touch with your clients on a regular basis? Try incorporating the following habits into your sales regimen:

Referrals are powerful selling tools when used correctly and as a part of an overall plan to increase your sales results. However, there’s a proper way to ask for referrals and another way that can leave your current clients annoyed and thus hurt your sales in the long run. Far too often, salespeople will commit to making classic mistakes when asking for referrals and assume (based on their disappointing results) that referrals aren't a worthwhile method to create more sales. However, referrals do work. They have the potential to connect you to new opportunities via your current network. This allows you to work with new potential clients with a level of trust and familiarity which otherwise would not exist without the referral. Let’s look at the top two mistakes salespeople make when asking for referrals:

In my experience, there are two key elements that intimidate sellers and keep them from asking for a referral: ego and fear. I think you’ll agree with me, salespeople have big, healthy egos. This isn’t a bad thing, because we are trained to believe that we can sell even in the face of adversity and when the odds are stacked against us. In fact, in order to really thrive in sales, you must be able to sell even when it seems as though the chips are down. <-- Click To Tweet On top of that, we prefer to sell by ourselves. Each of us consider our own methods to be the most effective. We also don’t want any help when it comes to executing these methods.