INNERGISE!

Imagine you’re a sales manager and you had a team of say, 10 sales people. Perhaps you’re paying each of them about £30,000 per annum, with commissions and bonuses, meaning you have a total payroll bill each year of about £300,000.

Now add all the costs associated with running a sales team of 10; office space, computers and IT, communications (phones etc), travel and so on. Your costs may reach to more than £500,000 per year. That’s a lot of costs for a business to cover, before having even made one sale.

Now imagine you had the same team of sales people and it cost you next to nothing – you’re already £500,000 ahead of your competitors / budgets.

You can create this “virtual sales team” quite easily, by developing a powerful referral system that continuously generates new business for you without having to pay a penny, and yet when we review various referral systems that organisations do have in place, they are often sporadic, disjointed and hugely ineffective.

The key components of a strategic referral system will vary depending on the organisation and the products / services they are selling, but in essence the headline focus is the same:

Deliver excellence and prove it

There is always a risk of someone else promoting your products and/or services to one of their contacts. You may not deliver or the products or services may not work, both of which will negatively impact the reputation of the person referring you.

To build trust and belief in your product or service you need to not only deliver absolute excellence in what you do, every time, but you also need to be able to prove it. Providing a series of well articulated case studies of where you have proven your worth in the past will support that.

Create your sales pitch (lift pitch)

If I was to ask each of your sales team individually to sell me your product or service, what would they say? Would they all be saying the same thing and would their pitch be engaging enough to grab my interest?

More often that not, the pitches we hear from the customers we work with are wildly different, unnecessarily long and complicated and, to be honest, quite uninspiring.

If that’s the case with our own internal salespeople, then imagine what someone who doesn’t work for you would say about you!

To negate this, you need to create a succinct and powerful message, a “lift pitch”, that not only is the one guiding message that your sales team use, but also is the message that anyone externally promoting your services and products is using. Remember, a good pitch is to the point, memorable and all about what you can do for your customers, and not all about you!

Build a referral team

Once you have your pitch in place, you then need to build a referral team, your free external sales team.

To do this, identify whom you know that fits the following criteria:

• They like and trust you
• They have used your services / products before
• They have a good network of contacts
• They are good salespeople themselves

Once you have your list, for each of them ask yourself what is one thing you have and that they want / need. This is the reward that you give them in turn for each referral. Quite often, if you really think about it, these rewards are both easy to administer and free.

These can include, reciprocal referrals of their business, free training and advice, reduced rates for your product / service and so on.

Engage your referral team and build momentum

Finally, you need to engage your new sales team by ensuring they are committed to the process (in return for the rewards they will receive),

You need to present your pitch to them, walk them through the case studies (and leave them with copies if necessary), train them up to use the pitch and then agree some targets to aim for.

Remember also, that for every referral you get from them that turns into new business for you, contact them, thank them and let them know what happened, so they can see the benefits of what they are doing for you.

An organisation that spends £500,000 on a sales team of 10 people that delivers on targets is doing well. An organisation that spends £500,000 on a sales team of 20 or more is clearly going to do far better!