What if 70% of your next year’s new customers could come from the people you already serve?

Most sales teams chase cold leads through networking, ads, and events—while overlooking the simplest, fastest growth lever sitting right in front of them. In this episode, you’ll discover why referrals consistently outperform traditional lead generation, why most teams fail to use them properly, and how a small shift in timing can dramatically increase your close rates and reduce the grind of chasing strangers.

By listening to this episode, you’ll learn:

• How referrals can offset customer churn and drive predictable, sustainable growth
• Why asking for referrals feels uncomfortable for many teams—and how to remove that friction entirely
• The three specific moments in the customer journey that generate the highest-quality referrals

Press play to learn how to turn referrals into a reliable growth engine that delivers warmer leads, higher trust, and faster sales—without adding more work to your pipeline.

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Episode Transcript

Ben Wright: 

In this episode, we will unpack how you can generate more referrals with this proven strategy.

Intro:

Welcome to Sales Process Made Simple, the show helping seven to eight figure industry construction and trade, sales and business leaders finally end the stress of inconsistent sales by simplifying your sales systems so your team can close more deals and grow faster.

I’m your host Ben Wright, a leader who has been building businesses and sales teams just like you for the last 20 years.

Ben Wright:

In this episode, we’ll go through why referrals are so powerful for future lead generation activities, why many teams don’t succeed at them, and the three levers you can pull to be increasing the number of referrals you get from your customers. Well, referrals. There are topics  so commonly discussed by businesses and sales teams and one that is fair to say, I very rarely come across a team who don’t understand what they are.

However, where I think many teams fail to capitalise on referrals as so important to their business is the understanding around just what a good referral can look like for that business. And what I mean by here is that if we were looking to double our business and we said, okay, we’ve got a base of existing customers who will continue on over the next year, and let’s say we have a natural attrition rate of 20 or 30%, that’s a reasonable number. But we’re to say at the same time, we’re going to make sure that we are growing our business by 20%. So, if we have 100 customers, we’re going to lose 20 to 30 of them. Let’s say we lose 30 of them, we’re down to 70, but we want to get to a net growth number of plus 20. So, a net number of 120 customers at the end of the year. So, we’ve got a gap there of 100 minus the 30 that we are losing through attrition plus the extra 20 that we need to get from growth. So, we’ve got a gap here of 50 new customers. 

Okay. So, let’s say we go through those 100 customers. In fact, let’s be a little bit conservative and say we go to those 70 customers and ask them for a referral. If half of those customers make one referral to us, that is 35 new customers across the next year or the majority of our 50 new target acquisition number, right? So, 35 of 50, it’s 70% of that acquisition number for the coming year.

So, I say that again, if we were to go to our 70 remaining customers who don’t churn during the year, ask them all for referrals and get one referral from half of them, we have generated 70% of our new business for the year. Now, when you think about how hard it can be to win new customers, to be able to generate anything through referrals is a win. But when you can generate such significant numbers, it really does impact sales growth and becomes a strategy that is well worth spending a lot of time on.

The problem is that for most sales teams, they’re not focussing on referrals as a strategy because they are so driven by new leads being a key lever that they measure performance on. So, what I mean here is that they are so focused on networking, on digital marketing, on going to trade shows, on all the traditional types of lead generation that show brand new customers into the business rather than recognising that our existing customers are a really effective way to bring referrals in. I also find that teams are often scared to ask for referrals because they’re worried about wasting their customers’ time or upsetting them.

When my experience in life and in business in general is that when people have a good experience with you, they’re typically happy to refer you to others. In fact, at a personal level, I’m more than happy to go out of my way if I have a good experience with a brand or a product or a service to recommend it to my friends and my colleagues because I know that if I’ve enjoyed that experience, they’ll enjoy it too and if their life is better from it, then I’m also happy. 

So, when we talk about referrals being a proven strategy, they are super effective at hitting new leads for our business even when we have attrition of customers. But often, we see teams who aren’t prepared to ask for referrals because they’re worried about upsetting their customers or simply focused on other activities. However, there’s three steps that you can roll into your sales experience that make asking for referrals much, much easier. 

So, the first piece here is we put into process three times that we’re asking for referrals and this is the main area I’ll focus on today. The first area or the first time I should say is when we have just signed up our customer. They’re really happy with our sales experience. They’re ready to go and they’re looking forward to what you’re about to roll out for them.

This is a terrific time to say, hey, thank you very much for putting your trust in us. Is there anyone else that you think would really benefit from our service? It’s a great time to roll in a gift for that customer if they do it. Hey, in return, we’ll do this. We’ll provide you a discount. We’ll provide you X percent off your next service. We’ll provide your friend a discount. It’s a terrific time to do that but generally, we want to be asking for referrals at the time when a customer is most happy with what we’re doing. So, at closing is number one. 

The second one is at delivery. So, when we’ve delivered a really good product, a really good service and they’re happy with what we’ve got, that is a fantastic time to say, hey, is there anyone else you know that would benefit from our services? Particularly, if you’re a small business, a family-run business, we’re able to say our business is built on referrals from customers like you. Is there anyone you might know that would really enjoy our service? Or even more impactfully is when they were referred by someone and you ask the question that says, hey, is there anyone else as you were referred to us? Is there anyone else who might really benefit from using our service? 

And the last point here is around asking for a referral at the retention point. At the retention point, it’s one I’ve read recently by Robert Scrob. I’d highly recommend it but the retention point is all about when you feel your customer has reached the point where they are buying into what you’re doing. This isn’t necessarily at sales close or at operational delivery. Sometimes, it’s after they’ve been using our product for a period of time. They might have had a good win. They might have embedded it into their lives. They might have had a time to enjoy the product or service.

But it’s recognising when that retention point is and asking for the referral then. 

So, three times is how I see great sales teams ask for referrals. Number one at time of close, number two at time of delivery, and number three is at time of retention point. To recap, most businesses aren’t asking for referrals because they’re so focused on other parts of lead generation. But those who are and those who really do double down on seeing referrals as a key pillar of their lead generation strategies often find that a lot of their new business comes for referrals and they then need to spend less time chasing some of the really hard referral yards. Those yards when customers are cold, they don’t know their business, they’ve had no introduction to them and so, in essence, are less likely to close versus when they’re being referred in, are referred from someone they trust and, in essence, are more likely to close because that relationship can be built quicker.

So, typically, when do we see great teams asking for referrals? It’s at the time of close, it’s at the time of delivery, and then lastly at the retention point, that time when we think customers have really bought into what we do. 

So, that’s the key takeaway from today. Referrals are an exceptional way to grow businesses and if you’re not rolling out referrals in your business, the key takeaway from today for you is how can you get your team focussing just that little bit more on referrals. Do you need to think about having a different team do it? Should your customer service team do it? Or if you don’t have other teams that could do it, how could you be doing it better through your sales people? Or if you don’t have a sales team, could you set up any automation into your business that could roll out referrals or simply make more calls yourself? Schedule out time in your calendar where you’re really regularly ringing your customers and asking for referrals because if every referral we bring in is going to be a higher close rate than cold leads, at the end of the day, we are going to be so much better off through this 1% better approach, through this 1% better approach around generating referrals and really focussing on growing our business.

So, that’s it for today. Very grateful as always to have you listening. We drop podcasts every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Keep up the focus on being 1% better each and every day. It will make the difference. Look forward to seeing you in the next episode.

But that’s it for today. Bye for now.

Are you struggling to grow your monthly sales numbers? Feel like you’ve reached the sales ceiling, are involved in every deal or have no real sales system in place to help you grow? And is that causing a level of worry or stress about how you can get more sales in the future? If that’s you, that’s exactly why we created the Sold Out Sales Teams programme to help you get month-on-month sales growth with less stress. 

In just the first week, we will lock down your quoting process to grow sales by 25% to 30%. That’s just week one.

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