As a small business owner, you probably already have or have at least considered implementing a referral program. Referrals can be an awesome way to effectively and efficiently grow your business without making sweeping and costly changes. If you’ve been keeping up with our blog, you’ve already tapped into the awesome power of warm calling, referral selling, and creating your own referral program. If you haven’t adopted referrals into your business plan, check out the articles below! They’re a great starter-kit for using referrals as an easy, effective way to grow your business.
1. Cozy up to hot leads with warm calls
2. Referral selling: the easiest, most effective sales method
3. How to create an effective referral program
Making a referral program can be daunting, however. It’s quite a task to manage your customers relationships as is, let alone keep track of points or free gifts. Thankfully, a CRM, or a customer relationship management software, can help keep you organized and work within the structure your referral program.
How a CRM can help you create your strategy
A CRM can hold all of your contacts in one place. You can easily search within the database for all contacts you’ve updated within the past year, and you instantly have a list of potential referrers. You can also create a list within your CRM for your “inner circle,” or the top contacts you want to get in touch with for your referral program. By tagging these contacts and keeping them in a saved group, you can pull them up without racking your brain or sifting through file drawers.
Once your referral program begins, you can record all your communications with customers in the CRM. The software can log emails you send to customers containing promotional materials for your program, and you can add notes about any interactions with referrers in their contact profiles. You can link contacts up that refer each other so that you don’t forget their relationship, and you can use a pipeline to make sure that you don’t forget any steps in your program’s process or what incentive level each referrer is at.
Because a CRM database can easily be shared between sales reps, all of your team members will be kept up-to-date. When communicating with clients, a sales rep can pull up their contact profile and view their referral program status, add new data, or link them to a newly referred contact. An accessible and accurate database will help sales reps communicate accurate information with customers, which will in turn make them feel that their progress within the program is recognized and therefore worth it.
All in all, a CRM will keep you organized and help you track the your referral program’s impact on your business.
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