For most high value sales professionals, coaches, consultants, and speakers – referral networking is everything. All the other noise you engage in with marketing and generating leads – cold calling, putting on webinars, attending networking events should take a backseat to referral marketing.
I was reminded of this the other day when reading a blog post on the Sassy Marketing News Blog. Here’s a snippet from the blog post about the effectiveness of referral networking.
Referral networking is perhaps the best tactic to grow and sustain a business. Referral networking is the process of gaining referrals from friends, associates and satisfied customers. You work with other respected and quality companies to support each other to grow and prosper. It’s easy to implement and the results can last a lifetime.
I’ve got 25 years of experience that reinforces this simple and basic concept. In our own executive search practice we’ve noticed this on a number of dimensions:
- Over half of our new search assignments come to us based on a referral. The referral could be a satisfied customer, someone who downloaded our free book “You’re NOT the Person I Hired”, or a twitter follower who liked our tweets about hiring top talent.
- Well over 95% of all executive candidates who received an offer from one of our clients came from a second-third level referral. Rarely was the first person contacted the winning candidate who got the job offer.
- Most successful senior executives have told us over the last two decades that almost everyone of their job leads and opportunities came from a referral vs. responding to a job advertisement on a job board.
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If referral networking is king to generating leads, opportunities, and sales – why then do most sales professionals, consultants, coaches, and speakers insist on spending time on ineffective and non-productive activities? Where do you spend your time in hunting for leads, prospects, and opportunities?
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Barry Deutsch
