One of the easiest BD (business development) routes for all of your recruitment consultants and your organisation is referral marketing.
Michael McLaughlin in his best seller Guerrilla Marketing highlights that successful companies will get up to 60% of their clients through referral and this ‘should’ be a business goal.
It’s logical really; isn’t it? You provide a great service and consequently your clients and candidates recommend you to their business connections, friends and family.
Before we launch into a number of different ways to make referrals work for you, it’s vital you have your marketing in place too; in other words your ‘presence’ online confirms that you are a credible choice for your contacts to refer their connection too.
This isn’t the lazy way to do business, because if one of your clients or candidates refers you to a colleague and then they land on your website or have less than a positive experience of you all the ‘referral energy’ will be lost along with the opportunity.
1. Provide a great service
Should go without saying and it doesn’t always happen. Customer service might not be hip and trendy and yet implemented consistently it will bring you an avalanche of leads.
Let me share a great story about a recent car purchase we made. We were blown away by the after ‘decision’ purchase (no money had changed hands at this point).
Hint: This could work in recruitment.
The sales guy in question sent us 3 videos in the run up to the car arriving. You can see the last one here. As you might imagine this video has gone all around our family and friends
One of our best friends was most disappointed that she didn’t get anything like the service we had the last time she bought her VW car. Guess what? She is a regular visitor to the lakes and is going to see Peter next time she is here.
Great service really does produce easy referrals. Peter doesn’t know I am sending this blog post out. Over the next few months it will probably get a few thousand views therefore lots of #Freeadvertisingforpeter.
Which leads me onto……………
2. Ask for them
We are a shy lot sometimes. We knock ourselves out looking after our clients and especially candidates and then forget to ask for a referral.
It’s a well-documented fact that one of the key rules of influence is reciprocity. You do me a favour and in return I am inclined to do the same. Even more so it seems when it comes to passing on recommendations of service providers. We all want to help our close connections; don’t we?
3. Have a referral process
Successful recruitment business owners have a great ‘product’ to sell, a motivated team and a honed sales and marketing process; asking for referral needs to be part of that process.
Timing is important
Often asking for a referral is left too late or doesn’t form part of the overall candidate or client journey. It needs to be a logical step with each candidate you place and each client you work with.
Will they all say yes? Probably not, though if you don’t have this as a business process you will never know.
Add it into your CRM or your diary to place a call and ask as part of your client or candidate process. consistently and pay attention to the next point.
Who do you want?
Be clear on your ideal client or candidate and ask specifically for that individual when you are requesting referrals.
E.g. “The type of person we can help the most Jane are……………….”
That way you don’t get ‘unplaceable candidates’ or ‘nightmare clients’ or someone in a niche sector that really isn’t your area of expertise. Being clear like this means that instead you help the clients and candidates you can best serve.
4. Make it worth their while
We do live in a commercial world and compensating someone for their referral is a well-recognised practice. We have a number of recruiting clients who are awesome at this.
They really understand what their market wants and the referral matches that. Here are a few ideas that appeal to different sections of the market
- Vouchers
- Holiday’s; weekends away
- Concert tickets
- Refreshments!
- Tickets to sporting events
5. Promote your referral scheme
‘Build it and they will come’ is a famous saying from the movie, Field of Dreams. Great film though the sentiment is rubbish.
Yes they will come provided you get a megaphone and let people know about it! We all lead busy lives. Hundreds of emails flood our inbox and we are all juggling multiple priorities.
Let people know you have a referral scheme. Promote it on your website, in your email signatures, make sure that your recruiters mention it as part of their sales conversations.
You can even run a promotion around it. A client of ours runs a couple of incentives each year and this is promoted in many different ways. On average he gets a 10:1 return on his investment.
Are referrals financially worth it?
Are referrals financially worth it? I hope we have laid out the case that they are.
Consider this, you will all know your numbers when it comes to sales conversion. Referrals aren’t cold contacts. The individual will be ‘pre sold’ on you as a potential recruitment company that can help them. Therefore your conversion rate will be higher.
Whereas a cold contact might be 10 or 20% conversion from cold to sold a referral could be as high as 90-100%; depending on where they are on the buyers cycle.
They will have carried out their own due diligence and will have looked at your online brand, and your social presence to ‘make sure’ you are still worth talking to.
Ready to make it happen?
Important
As an ambitious recruitment organisation, THE marketing strategy to master is email marketing. It will consistently deliver both candidates and clients.
In a special complimentary training Webinar, we give you the template for writing emails we use for our clients and the exact 4 campaigns that are working now.
You can register here.
