Choosing the Correct Referral Services for Your Company is of Paramount Importance
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What are referral services? This is a paid for service used by a business to either refer to them direct prospects that are actively seeking the company’s product or services, or that places them in an advantageous position within a closed market, per se, for that service or product. You might pay a bit more to have a service tell you who is looking for what you supply. This can greatly increase your ROI over standard cold calling, and should be looked on as a tool to be used, not the only way to gather new clients.
Most of these services, however, especially those that supply non-exclusive leads, leave a lot to be desired. Leads lists that are purchased have usually gone through many calls by the competition before you get them, and you will usually for this reason, be unhappy with the prospecting results. Which is why choosing the correct type and kind of referral services for your company is of paramount importance.
Simply throwing money at something will work, eventually, but it works quicker and better for you if you have some basic data about your prospective referral service beforehand.
Where are these leads coming from? From their own marketing efforts, or from an amalgamation service (takes leads/info from lots of sources and puts them together in one searchable database, like Monster) or are the leads supplied in some other fashion? How many other companies have these already been sold to? Does this service have some sort of refund policy? How often will you receive updates/fresh leads from them? (Not the best way to go if 200 fresh leads are provided once every month if you have 5 salesmen who require daily leads). Can this service benefit me in other areas? (A client referral program for example..) Will this referral service be able to support more demand from my company when the time comes? What are their current clients’ conversion ratio’s, for a similarly priced product or service as yours, when you are the referral services leads?
These and questions like them may seem obvious, as they are the questions you should be asking all your suppliers on a monthly basis, but too many people using a service seems to touch an “I trust You” button that makes common sense go away. Decide on whether to use a service after answering this – will I make more money if I use this? The same basics apply to whether or not the service is right – Will I get what I pay for and need from them?