Great customers are the lifeblood of any business. Not only are they consistent spenders, but they are vocal advocates for your brand.
If you’re a restaurant, these are your best regulars who bring new friends with them all the time.
If you’re a financial advisor, these are the clients who make all their family members set up retirement accounts through you.
If you’re a dentist, these are your patients who send all their neighbors and PTA families to you.
You know who they are because every time you see them, you wish you could clone them.
So let me show you the process to do exactly that:
Step One: Get Social
The easiest and fastest way for your customers to show you extra love is by liking, commenting, and sharing your social media posts.
To increase the likelihood of this happening, make sure you connect with them and like their posts. This will cause them to reciprocate.
Step Two: Ask for a Review
The second easiest way to get customers to show you extra love is by asking them to give you a review on Google and Facebook.
Make it super easy for them by sending them the link directly.
Protect yourself from bad reviews by using a third party review collection service. This will triage all your ratings and reviews so only 4 stars and above get posted directly. Anything less and the service sends you a message with the negative review so you can reach out to the customer directly, discreetly, and not publicly.
Step Three: Get it in writing
Likes and star reviews are super easy for your customers to do. Providing a written testimonial requires more thought and time, and therefore are harder to get.
Choose your best customers and make a personal request for them to send you a testimonial.
Or, even better, write the testimonial yourself and ask them to approve it. They’ll appreciate you saving them the time.
Step Four: Turn it into a Case Study
Once you have a testimonial, it’s a short step to creating a case study that you can use in your sales process.
A case study documents the change you helped your client achieve, showing the before and after pictures, and documenting how you helped them get there.
For a case study, you just need to know what their results were. You may already know this, so the case study is super easy to write. If you don’t, you’ll have to ask them for the results.
Once you’ve written the case study, add their testimonial, and then ask them to approve it.
Step Five: Get the Referral
The problem most businesses make is they jump steps one through four and go right for the referral.
As a result, getting the referral becomes a hit or miss kind of moment. Sometimes you get one, but most times you don’t.
Growing your business on referrals can create tremendous revenue unpredictability unless you do steps one through four.
Consider, once a customer has given you a positive rating, approved a testimonial for you, helped you create a case study of how much you helped them, they are queued up to give you a referral.
At this point, they have already advocated for you four separate times, testifying to how great you are.
In their own minds, they’ve staked their own reputation on you being as good as they say you are, right? They’ve put it in writing four separate times.
Once they make their first referral to you, the Advocacy process loops back to Step 1. You have to keep engaging them so they send you referrals consistently and reliably.
SURPRISE STEP 6: Deliver!
Once you receive a referral, you now have a huge responsibility to deliver. Otherwise you risk the reputation of your client who made the referral.
If you don’t deliver, you’ll burn your client and never get another referral again. So make sure you nurture and take care of your Advocates and their referrals. When you do this, your business will grow organically and quickly.
MOST IMPORTANTLY: Make this a regular process! The mistake most businesses make is that they learn something brand new that will help their company and they do it once.
You want to take these 6 steps and turn them into a replicable process for your team so they execute it consistently every time for every customer.
With a systematic process in place, you’ll generate more advocates and new business every month.
Share your best practice for getting referrals in the comments section below and I’ll pm you my email templates for requesting reviews.
