You Might Be Surprised Which B2B Referrals Are Closing

The sales machine at any B2B company has to be fine-tuned, well-oiled, and running full speed to truly make a difference to the bottom line. I believe that many companies suffer simply because they’re so dependent upon new business via cold calls, but their staff doesn’t have the right team in place to do the hard work to achieve success.

A CEO recently shared with me Sales and Marketing Metrics for successful Software as a Service companies by Insight Venture Partners – and the numbers may shock you. It takes a ton of work to acquire a new customer. You can’t have a team that’s not coming into work sprinting every day and expect to make a difference.

Or can you? There is one source of B2B business that converts much higher than any other that you may not be taking advantage of.

When analyzing conversion rate by channel, one channel emerges as a clear winner. Customer and employee referrals generate 3.63% conversion rate, almost double than the next channel—websites with 1.55% conversion rate. Social has 1.47% conversion rate and paid search 0.99%. The worst performing channels are lead lists with 0.02% conversion rate, events with 0.04% conversion rate and email campaigns with 0.07% conversion rate. Gilad Raichstain, Implisit.

We’re always surprised as we speak to solutions partners and many of them don’t have a program in place that rewards either employee or customer referrals. Your employees are (or should be) champions for your business – promoting you across their networks. Your customers are another amazing resource. Do you have an email that goes out periodically asking if they might wish to refer anyone? Do you provide some prizes or cash for those referrals? This data may just make you start!

At minimum, having a landing page that captures a source with unique links distributed among your employees, customers, and partners should be high on your priority. This will allow you to track and reward your best referrals!

Implisit updates your prospect and customer communications to the appropriate CRM record, letting you manage your pipeline more effectively while saving you and your team valuable time on tedious tasks. Implisit utilizes algorithms that identify each email, contact and calendar event and match it to the right opportunity – 100% automatically.