Referral sourcing and why it’s your best…and worst bet

Referrals reduce your sales expenses and sales cycle, build your level of satisfied customers, increase your sales revenue, as well as a host of many other benefits.

Many real estate business owners alike are mostly of the opinion that their best customers are those referred to them by existing or past customers. However, a snag is that many assume that once they’ve painstakingly provided quality products and services to their customers, that the line-up of referrals will automatically follow, that these customers will instantaneously scream into every available megaphone and shout their business name to whoever cares to listen.

Sadly, this isn’t so. It requires a lot more to leverage all strategies to boost and milk the entire potential of referrals. The art of generating and cultivating referrals especially in real estate needs to be honed and done correctly.

Set up a referral inference and mode from the get go: Every aspect of the new customer experience should be structured to result in them giving you referrals. For example, for real estate investors, your desire should be not just to help your clients but also their family, friends and acquaintances, too.

And so structure your processes in a way that will make customers more likely to refer you. This could include things such as: a family-friendly welcoming reception room and clean restroom, educational materials, investor guides, co-ed investments (provision of platforms where friends or partners can come together to invest), professional trained drivers and tour guides for site inspections, and many more.

Plant the referral seed: While using online reviews of other brands in your industry as a model or point of reference, structure your processes in a way that will mimic the positive experiences you’ve read about while avoiding the negative ones. Be sure to discuss this with your employees and even provide examples because they’re the ones who will be implementing these changes in your business.

Make a mental note, and go about your business in an assured manner that people will refer you by planting this in their mind early on. On your first encounter, ask where and how they heard about your business. Establish in your conversations that many of your business come from referrals, and that the referral in itself is your biggest gratification for the service you render, thus subconsciously spreading the referral seed.

The “thanks” will get you far: This is a key principle, the fact that you actively acknowledge and appreciate the patronage and celebrate a client relationship, even before a client is made out of an individual. Leverage on an opportunity to make a client by continuously building that “referral rapport” right after their first visit.

Create customer coupons, gift cards, mail out a new-patient welcome package that’s a catch…creativity makes this list inexhaustive.

Reviews and surveys are still a great way to get referrals. A huge number of people still trust online reviews as much as if their friend referred them.

However, it would be your hope that the reviews about your brand will be compellingly good. Else, this is where the spiral of bad referrals, or the negative discrediting can start.

Referrals can be a double-entendre, a double-edged sword

If you haven’t kept up to your end of the deal, haven’t delivered on promise mad, make poor customer service choices and decisions, take your customers for granted, a de-referral system is set in motion. And bad word about your business will spread faster than wild fire.

In summary, to get the right kind of referrals, set yourself up and stage your business to get and receive it. Watch your business grow, not plummet.