B2B referral sales systems – the outbound growth engine most startups never use
blog.close.io
blog.close.io
“It seems like we're a great fit. I'm excited. Before we go any further exploring a potential deal I want to bring up that we're fully focused on building world class technology and on servicing and supporting our customers to massive success. What that means is that we're not investing in marketing and sales as heavily because our happy customers are referring us to others who could benefit from our product. Does that sound like a fair arrangement to you?”
What a great way to phrase the ask. Switches from you pressuring them for the referral to making them want to help.
I help make YesGraph, a referral recruiting tool. We're just getting started ramping up sales, so something like referrals that keeps the new leads warm is wonderful. Plus the marketing message that we are all about the referrals writes itself.
Its really amazing how well this works too. I recently made the jump from tech to advertising, and I actually built us to ramen profitable doing exactly this. The trick was a bit of pro bono work at the beginning to light the fuse.
For most SaaS apps your customer had a chance to experience the product on a free trial of some sorts.
If they are convinced enough to buy many will be ready to recommend.
Asking for it at that point only shortens the referral sales cycle (you don't have to schedule a separate call for this since you're already talking to them) and once you've closed the positive feedback loop they can start giving you more referrals (and at that point they've probably been a customer for a month or two).
Starting earlier just makes this gain a lot more momentum faster.
Most likely you will have a much lower success rate since the biggest point of conversion in the approach outlined in the post is at the "2nd ask" (which is hard to do via email).
But it's a lot better than not asking for referrals in the first place :)
Would love to hear what kind of results you would see doing this!
I have noticed that customers referred by their friends (without us asking) move through the process very quickly. They already trust us.
I don't have first hand experience in automating this via email. My experience has been exclusively with phone sales so far.
I've found that in B2B you don't want to "pay" for referrals and that people are more likely to make them when they feel like they are providing value to their network without any selfish incentives.
Once in a while someone will ask for it and it's up to you to decide if you want to give people a discount or something else for helping you close new business. I personally think that's reasonable when asked but wouldn't offer it upfront.
[1] those who likely know a business to introduce you to and are seemingly willing to do so, based on the maturity of the relationship with you and them.
I wonder how it's doing the VOIP and Email.
I absolutely loved the demo video on close.io, it's the only demo video where I knew exactly what was going on because they slowed it down.
http://blog.close.io/the-tech-stack-behind-close-io-sales-co...
Where do you host the backend? I think Flask is a great choice, it is easier to deal with than writing a backend in Node.js.