Sales Training: How to Get Referrals for B2C & B2B Sales

If you are in B2B sales or B2C sales, is essential to understand why these common actions are actual mistakes that will stop your clients, friends and family from referring leads to your business.

Often these mistakes are overlooked, and some might even seem harmless, but they have a very negative impact on the way we ask for sales referrals and in the results we get from this.

Sales referrals are a great strategy for B2C and B2B lead generation. The results and impact that they can have over your total sales are very significant. Of course, this can only happen if we follow some principles when it comes to asking for referrals.

In this lesson, we will cover each one of those fundamental principles. And by the end of the lesson you will be more prepared to implement these business development strategies into your daily routine.

Your friends and family can be a great source for lead generation through sales referrals. But more often than not, sales professionals and solopreneurs find that they get none leads from them. And the reason for this is normally now knowing how to ask for referrals properly when you are asking your friends or family.

Grant Cardone, probably the most important sales coach right now, says in one of his books that you have to leverage all your network to generate leads and create business opportunities. In fact he recommends to constantly have lunch with other people so that you can get better results for your business. With what you will learn in this lesson and the two previous ones, now you will be ready to fully leverage your network as he recommends.

Asking for referrals might be a little different if you are in business development for startups and tech companies, than if you are a solopreneur, freelancer or a sales coach, but in every case there are just a few instances for when we can ask for the referral.

It is important to understand these instances, their advantages and disadvantages, and which ones perform better.

In this lesson I will share with you my recommendations for when you should ask for referrals, and I will tell you which one performs better for us.

How to ask for referrals in a way that delivers results is the key for sales referrals lead generation.

In this lesson we will loom at 3 different scripts for asking for referrals. We will break them down and analyze why we say what we say. This will give you the knowledge to be able to build your own templates for referral asking.

Learn this well and you will be able to reduce the time you spend prospecting, or cold calling, sending cold emails, or doing phone sales, or doing common business development techniques.

In this lesson of this lead generation course, you will discover the most effective way to have your friends and family help you with sales referrals.

This is one of the most effective sales referral strategies, one that delivers results over and over again, no matter where you live, the culture or the industry. It is particularly effective for local lead generation.

If you work in a startup, this might not apply to you since you won’t have old clients. But if you are in a business where you have a list of old clients, levering them to generate leads is essential, and can be extremely profitable.

Now, to do this effectively you need to know what is the right approach to ask these old clients for referrals. How to ask for a referral when you haven’t talked to that client in months or years.

This knowledge is extremely useful for some industries like realtors, insurance agents, mortgage brokers, freelancers and consultants, to name a few.

Videos are a great way to ask for referrals. Unfortunately, out of all the sales referral strategies, this is not a technique that you can use with everyone, as it would consume too much time, but in some cases is something that you need to consider implementing in your lead generation strategy. And it is certainly better than, phone sales, cold calling or door to door prospecting.

In this lesson you will learn how to ask for referrals through videos and how to leverage this technique.

Learning how to ask for sales referrals through email is also important. And you should always make it easier for the people you are asking for referrals to help you. One of the ways you do that when asking through email is by adding a template that your friends, family or clients can just copy and paste.

Now, while this is great for b2c and b2b lead generation, and it might seem extremely easy, more often than not people make terrible mistakes that will cost them the referral opportunity.

If you want to increase your chances of getting referrals through just sending emails, this lesson will help you accomplish that goal.

If you are in B2C or b2b sales, business development, and particularly if you are looking for local lead generation, this is one of the most effective sales referrals strategies and one of my favorite ones.

In fact I often talk about the 100 dream clients list, well this is a spin-off of that sales strategy. When it comes to this technique, I will say it is more effective when applied for small cities and towns. Nonetheless, whatever kind of business or industry you are in, and no matter where you live, definitely take a look to this lesson as you might get some ideas out of it, and find a way to implement it effectively for your situation.

Have you ever wondered how to ask for sales referrals on LinkedIn? Well, while I will tell you that LinkedIn lead generation is the king for b2b sales. I love LinkedIn Marketing, and I have several courses on LinkedIn for businesses. Now, when it comes to using LinkedIn to ask for referrals, I will admit that is not the best option. I will certainly not include among the top sales referral strategies.

Nonetheless, I must include a lesson about it, because whenever you read or hear a sales coach talking about asking for referrals, they will suggest to use LinkedIn, of course most of the times they are not LinkedIn Marketers, and they don’t use it for asking for referrals, so they don’t know the complexity of doing so.

In this lesson of this business development course I will share with you the pros and cons of using LinkedIn as a lead generation tool for referrals.

Definitely a sales strategy that you have to try at least a few times. While it might not be a sales referral strategy per se, it is a close cursing, as we will be using an actual client to leverage their brand and name to close another lead. So in a way, it has the same effect as if they are referring to us that lead.

This is a technique that we have used often, particularly when I worked in a big city and we were focused mostly in B2B sales

This might be one of my favorite lead generation and sales referrals strategies… as well as business development strategies. Yeah, sure I might say that about a lot of techniques, what can I say?!… I love sales. And if you love sales as well, and you love improving your sales skills, I bet you will like this one too!

Organizing events to generate sales by leveraging the presence, name and brand of your actual clients can be a great way to boost your sales. This strategy is particularly effective for local lead generation, but it will work in any setting.

Introducing sales automation tools into your business and your sales process is essential nowadays. It will take your lead generation to the next level. No matter if you are in B2C sales, or B2B sales, no matter if you work in a startup, tech company, if you are a realtor, insurance agent, consultant, coach, freelancer, solopreneur, or anything in between, sales automation is always beneficial.

While I can not go in depth on how to use automation, as that will depend on which tools do you use in your company, which crms (Hubspot, Zoho, Salesforce, SugarCRM, etc), I must mention it and I will give you and strategy that you should implement right away to leverage your list of old clients and leads.

While you will find a thousand articles about sales referrals that share with you gift ideas and what not, to thank your referrals, I will not do that here. In this lesson of this business development course, I will share with you what I believe to be the best technique to thank those who take the time to help you and that send you referrals.

This might not seem as important as other parts of the sales referral, but it is essential to create the sales referral sustainability that we aim for. Thus reducing the time we have to spend in other business development and prospecting techniques such as cold calling, phone sales, or cold email (although I do love cold email, and I believe that you should give it a try)

Asking for referrals is only admissible if you are willing to give sales referrals as well. Be willing to give referrals as much as you are willing to ask for them.