The biggest hurdle most owners face when trying to promote their business is consistently generating referrals from existing clients.  They are trying to capture lightning in a bottle - a fundamental law of human nature that the best and brightest minds in advertising have never been able to overcome. It’s simply this - when you promote your business, what someone else says about you is 100x more credible than what you say about yourself.

What we try to do in our business is put everything into a system or process that can be duplicated and perfected.  So how do you create a system around something that you have almost no control over?  

Use this Client Referral Form

The Surfing Guru built into our heads the need to use your existing client base to help sell new clients.  He has some great systems to automatically generate client testimonials to help sell new business.  With our website marketing system, we didn't have a client base that we could use for testimonials, so we used the power of our existing clients in another way.  We decided to implement a system that would generate some good viral marketing for us. 

When our new clients signed up, we sent them a Welcome Packet that had all the information that they needed to get their service set up.  It included a letter welcoming them aboard, a report with helpful information how to get the most out of their service, a form we needed to fully provision them, and our secret weapon - a client referral form.

Client Referral Form

What is so great about this form is that it's a win-win for everyone.  When our new clients sign up for the online marketing service, they are all excited about the service they signed up for and we hope that they can share that same enthusiasm withe their colleagues.  Their colleagues get introduced to a great service that they might be able to take advantage of as well.  If any of their referrals sign up for the service, the client gets a fairly significant credit in their account.  And it works out well for use because we get new leads, who are probably pre-qualified, and who are less resistant to us because someone they new referred us to them. 

One of the important things we do with the form is that we never explicitly ask clients for referrals.  We do not want to put them in an awkward position in which they feel obligated to refer someone they know.  We just put the form in the welcome packet.  They know what it's for and if they're inclined to refer anyone, great!

Last month, we had a lot of new clients sign up for our service and while the majority of them didn't refer anyone to us, several filled out the form (and added a few extra).  Hopefully, we can generate some new sales and those clients can refer some additional leads to us - and the cycle continues!

Any Business Can Use This Idea

I first heard about using this system to generate referrals from a marketing podcast that I was listening to and I was skeptical about the ability to use it in our business.  The company that shared the example in the podcast was a carpet-cleaning company.  I'm not sure why but I just felt that it was much easier for something as simple and relatively inexpensive as carpet-cleaning than our online marketing business.  Luckily, I decided to take a shot with it.  

I realized that no matter what the business, if you sell some sort of product or service, you can ask customers to refer new customers.  You might not necessarily give the client your service/product (if they don't have use for more than one) but you could do something simple like sending them a $25 gift card for every referral.  If you have an ecommerce site, have a form after the checkout process or send them an e-mail after the purchase with the client referral offer.  If you sell something in a bricks-and-mortar store, put info about the offer in the bag so that they can read it when they take out their new purchase.  There are a bunch of new ways that you can implement this great form of viral marketing.