Most small businesses dabble in referrals, but they never really get good at it.

If you’re like most small businesses, you’ve tried to get referrals, but you haven’t been able to turn it into your primary stream of new high-value clientele. Well, at Client Focus we’ve been able to drive referral business to over 60 percent of our new customers. It didn’t happen in a day though; we had to learn to become effective at asking for referrals. Of course, many referrals are unsolicited, and that’s a big confidence booster for us, but if we hadn’t learned to be effective at it, we wouldn’t be talking about these insane referral numbers that we’re talking about.

The Importance of Lessons Learned Meetings
So if you’re a small business, and you’re providing a great service and great value and a great experience, but your referral business isn’t taking off, set a goal for the next 12 months that after every review meeting, you and your team are going to sit down and have a lessons learned meeting and go over how the referral request went. Each meeting will give you one thing that you can commit to doing next time. If you meet with say, 20 clients a month between now and 12 months from now, that’s going to give you almost 250 opportunities to practice this. You’ll learn a ton about how your clients perceive your business.

At the end of it you’ll be a referral powerhouse, so try that on and let us know how it works and if your team would benefit from training on how to become a robust referral machine. We’re here to help.