The Quickest Way to DOUBLE YOUR BUSINESSS  (Without Spending A Penny!)

Can you tell me -without guessing and without doing a lot of digging around – how many referrals per active client or customer you averaged during the last 12 months?

It’s a key statistic, yet most business owners have no grip on it at all. The quickest way to double your business is simply to get every existing customer to bring you another one. Not only will you double your business but…

• It lowers your marketing costs. Often it’s free (or virtually free.)
• There’s less price resistance. Customers referred to you by satisfied customers come with a certain level of pre-established trust. They are predisposed to buy. And they’ll be less resistant to price than new customers attracted by advertising.
• You’ll get more referrals. The customer obtained by referral is generally much more likely to refer a new prospect to you than an advertising-generated customer.

To increase your referrals, start with two words: Priority and Accountability. Priority begins with two statistics you’ll need to measure.

Stat #1: The average number of referrals received each week or month; 

Stat #2: The number of conversations about referrals required to generate one. (More on this in a moment (below). 

These two statistics have to become you and your staff’s highest priority and your primary focus.

You also will need to hold yourself accountable. That means asking yourself each day: 

• How many clients did I talk with today about referrals? 

You must hold yourself and your staff accountable. And you even have to hold your clients accountable when they offer to refer someone.

Taking whatever referrals happen to come your way and being happy with that is lazy and negligent. Measurement will automatically improve your performance. I promise. Any experienced athlete will tell you that without measurement and accountability, there will be a gradual decline in performance. With measurement and accountability, there will be stability and, usually, improvement in performance. It’s my clients who use a scorecard to record weekly and monthly statistics that are the ones that are growing. And it’s not a coincidence. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve seen significant improvement in businesses solely because of the imposed awareness that comes with the reporting of statistics and activities.  

Successful businesses are managed, even micro-managed, by the numbers. If that sounds boring or tedious to you, it shouldn’t. It’s the only scientific approach to achieving goals and success. Let’s take a real-life example with a physiotherapist clinic. They determined that they were averaging one referral for every ten times the physio actually conversed with a patient about referrals. They want ten referrals each month. How many patients does the physio need to talk to? He needs to speak to 100. Divide this number by 15 clinic days in the month and you need 7 conversations per day. So roughly one per work hour. Now, if each hour you monitor yourself and check off that you have conversed with a patient about referring, you will achieve your “big” goal. If you miss one hour, then simply double up the next hour. If you apply that kind of measurement to every important aspect of your performance – and your staff’s performance – you’ll be amazed by the results.

Most businesses could easily increase by 50% to 100% purely and exclusively through installing this kind of measurement—not spending a penny more on advertising. No big marketing breakthroughs. Just automatic performance improvement through measurement, priority and accountability. Even if you don’t have any staff to help you, you can use this idea to coach yourself successfully. Of course, the real question is will you implement the actions and disciplines needed to achieve this? Or will you cheat yourself out of more business by not really committing to your referral goals? It’s up to you.