Should I Try to Find New Customers, or Just Keep Getting Referrals?

For a small organisation trying to grow rapidly, you will generally need to find and attract new clients yourself, rather than solely relying on referrals from your existing customer base.

While receiving referrals from your current networks and customers is beneficial, life doesn't always reflect what it appears to be within this 'referral bubble'.

A potential risk when evaluating your market positioning and appeal is that your perception of your capabilities and distinctiveness may be overly inflated.

Why is that?

Typically, referrals have already determined what they need (or have been informed of their needs) and have been directed to you as the solution to their issues.

So you haven't needed to search for your customer, and you haven’t had to present to them in a way that attracts customers directly to you who have never seen or heard of you before.

At least, not in a strong enough way to build a sales pipeline healthy enough never to need another referral.

Making the transition from referrals to finding new business can be challenging:

• you have to find the new customers, and

• you have to convince them that you’re exactly who and what they need to avoid competitive pitches and multiple sales calls

Sometimes, clients might come directly to you - but the usual referral has already determined their needs and has been informed that you are the right person to assist them.

They’re a “warm” lead and 'half sold' before they even get to you; they are going to like what you say once you talk to them, and this is why the conversion rate is high.

In that scenario, from a marketing perspective, all you need is a solid capability-based website for them to reference before contacting you, making life pretty easy. All you have to do is close the deal.

Many people say that once they get a prospect in the room they usually close the deal, which is great, but think about how they ended up in that room and what they were told before they got there!

Moving outside the referral bubble, finding (as opposed to hoping to be found) ideal prospects and converting them from cold to warm to a new client is a very different ball game.

Step back and think for a minute about this group who are not referred to you, and they may:

• Not even know they have a problem or be contemplating buying

• Know they have a problem, but it’s not painful enough yet to fix it

• Think they can solve things themselves

• Have misdiagnosed their problem and be heading down a different path to solve it

• Not be aware of new or other options available to solve their problem

• Have never seen or heard of you

• Have no idea how to approach finding a vendor to help them

• Not know how much things might cost, and the resources required to engage an external party

At a minimum, even if you only want to catch their interest, there could be a lot of effort required from your marketing effort.

A capability statement that serves you well with referrals isn’t always going to work with new prospects, unless you get lucky.

Occasionally you will get lucky, but it won’t fill and build a healthy visible sales pipeline with predictable conversion rates.

This is why so many marketing activities predicated on existing experience and the 'referral bubble' can prove costly and ineffective.

The bottom line here is to consider first how to make yourself marketable enough to find and attract new prospects?

Do you rely on customers referrals, rather than trying to find new clients?