One of the single, biggest impacts you can make in lead generation for your business is developing a network of referral partners.

A referral partner is another business owner or company that specifically refers their clients to your business. As an example, one of my clients provides natural stone cleaning and sealing service. We designed and implemented a telemarketing campaign to contact landscapers across Melbourne who could refer their clients to him for stone cleaning and sealing services and it now generates him the majority of his repeat business.

Once you have a referral partner who believes in your business and the value you provide, they will automatically send you leads. 

This is the magical ‘word of mouth’ stuff that you hear every successful business owner talk about when you ask them ‘how do they get clients/customers/patients’. Of course, customers themselves can generate referrals, but an even stronger source is OTHER business owners.

Other business owners are in constant contact with a stream of qualified buyers : people who are happy to spend money to fix their problems. So not only do they send you MORE leads, the leads they send are MORE QUALIFIED (ie, they have proven they spend money already and are less likely to be ‘price shopping’).

So, how do you find more referral partners for your business?

Step 1 – Create a list of your top 20 DREAM referral partners. Think of other local Geelong (or online) businesses that you know deal with your target audience, but aren’t necessarily a direct competitor. If you are a hairstylist, you might target nail salons. If you are a custom furniture maker, you might target more general furniture stores that can’t service custom requests.

Step 2 – Create an outstanding value proposition for those partners. If your potential referral partners don’t know you, it can be hard to ‘get a foot in the door’ with them. You will need an outstanding value proposition that benefits both THEM and THEIR clients. Think about what you offer, then create a super special deal (the best offer would include a kickback to the referral partner) and then…

Step 3 – Start to build a relationship with them. This can be the most daunting part for a business owner that isn’t accustomed to cold prospecting. But you will need to be regularly contacting, following up and showing value to your dream referral partners. This would be a process of emailing, networking opportunities, cold calling and appointment setting to build a relationship and eventually deliver your outstanding value proposition.

As I said before, any kind of ‘cold contact’ to anyone is always going to be a little awkward (business owners have to deal with this almost daily) and it WILL take multiple contacts across a period of time to ‘win over’ your partners. 

But it WILL happen eventually, as long as you genuinely A) have an outstanding value proposition and B) follow up continuously with useful advice/information/help for your referral partners until they understand the VALUE you can provide their customers or clients with your products/services.

Luke Paolini