Boost your batting average with a targeted referral strategy, and win the sales game this season.
Batter up!
Baseball season is in full swing here in the United States—a sure sign that spring has officially sprung. Spring is also a great time to up your game and make the pitches that get your sales prospects on base.
Baseball is a long season with 162 games per team, played over approximately 30 weeks. It’s probably the only sport where you can have a success rate in the range of 30 percent and still be considered a star with a multimillion-dollar contract.
Let’s break down what it takes to be an all-star using an example from the movie, Bull Durham:
In baseball, what separates a superior hitter from an average hitter is only 30 more hits in a season. That’s all. While a .250 hitter is considered an average ball player, a .300 hitter is considered superior. If each of them has 600 at bats in a season, a .250 hitter will have 150 hits, while the .300 hitter will have 180 hits. The difference of only 30 hits equates to approximately one extra hit per week for an entire baseball season.
What’s Your Batting Average?
This is the same kind of analysis you need to do for your business. How many additional “hits” do you need to reach your revenue and profit goals? How many more referral meetings and referral clients will get you to your goal? How will you know that your referral-selling strategy is working?
Choose some or all of these metrics to manage your referral activity:
- The number of people you ask for referrals each week
- The number of referrals you receive
- The number of referral meetings you schedule
- The number of referral meetings you conduct
- The number of new deals you book
- Increase in revenue
- Increase in deal size
- Increase in new customers
- Increase in profitability
Draft Everyone for Your Team
Business referrals come from everywhere. Think about it. Identify all the people you know. Those people know people as well. And you don’t know who they know until you ask. You might get the perfect referral from your attorney, another passenger on an airplane, your fellow employees, your next-door neighbor, or even your family. Everyone in your network can be part of your sales team.
Ask for at least one referral each week, and you’ll hit the ball out of the park. You may not make millions of dollars, but you might help your clients do so. You’ll be at least a .300 hitter, and everyone wins.
Step Up to the Plate: Comment Here
There’s a saying in baseball that you’ll never get to second unless you take your foot off first. There’s a saying in sales: If you don’t ask, you don’t get. Are you getting at least one more hit a week? What are your referral-selling metrics? And how are you hitting your numbers?
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