Please, please, please take control of your selling!

I presented to a room full of business owners at a conference last week and, with 2023 just around the corner, I felt that the best value I could bring to the room was to challenge everyone on how much control they have over their selling.

The main question is about who is in control, you or the prospect?

In an inbound sales strategy, we use funnels and triggers to get the prospect to take the first connection action … However, this leaves the prospect in control.

In an outbound sales strategy we take full responsibility for the first connection action and design the process to allow us to move the prospect through in a very deliberate way.

The two strategies are very different.

As part of that session I asked the room, by show of hands, who got a lot of their business by word of mouth.

Then I asked them to keep their hands up if they had a robust and predictable system that they ran, to cause their clients to refer prospects to them.   

Most of the hands went down – there were only two or three hands left up.

So for most people word of mouth really means ACCIDENTAL!

Clients refer other people to you when THEY think about it.

The first outbound strategy EVERY business should install, is a deliberate referral process, where you are reaching out to existing clients in an organised and tactical way to gather referrals from them.

This one change has the potential to add tens of percentages of business to your revenue line.

This is my challenge to you for 2023, you probably have many things you want to do, but please add installing a deliberate, predictable and robust referral system to that list.

A very fair question for me to ask is “Is there anything else that is more important or has the potential for greater immediate gain, than to optimise the referral potential of your best clients?”