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March 01, 2010 at 07:00 PM
“Mark,” a salesperson in Poland, began selling financial investment products five months ago, after a 2-month induction. What prospecting method did they teach him? Cold calling, of course. “When I started to search actively for clients using this approach, the results were even worse than I was told to expect: 150 phone calls and five agreed-upon meetings (three completed, two forgotten). Customers acquired: None.”
Mark read my book, No More Cold Calling(TM): The Breakthrough System That Will Leave Your Competition in the Dust, and “almost immediately stopped doing cold calls.” He prepared materials for his network-and started asking for referrals. “It took me a week-plus to rearrange the way I work, and my results changed,” he recently wrote to me. Over the course of six weeks in December and January, he arranged 18 meetings – five of them through referrals – and got two new (“very promising”) customers. And he has another four in progress. Asking for referrals has become an inherent part of his job. The process works.
Game-changing year for this reader? You bet. For you? It absolutely could be! No matter where you are in our increasingly connected world, referrals rock!
In fact, in a recent Webinar survey I conducted, attendees identified the two biggest sales challenges they face:
- Getting the meeting at the level that counts (58 percent)
- Converting prospects to customers (47 percent)
But, when they receive a qualified referral, they report securing a new client more than 50 percent of the time. In fact:
- 31 percent said more than 50 percent of the time;
- 30 percent said more than 70 percent of the time; and
- 23 percent said more than 90 percent of the time.
Wow, they made my case: Referrals address the two largest sales challenges – big time.
