Keyword Elite v2.0

What are referral services? A business may used this paid service to refer to them direct prospects that are actively seeking the company’s product or services. You pay a bit to have a service tell you who is looking for what you have. This can greatly increase your ROI over standard cold calling, and should be looked on as a tool to be used, not the only way to gather new clients.

Most of these services, especially those that supply non-exclusive leads, are useless. Leads lists that are purchased have usually gone through many calls by the competition before you get them, and you will usually for this reason, be unhappy with the prospecting results. Which is why choosing the correct type and kind of referral services for your company is of paramount importance.

Paying money to try different things might work eventually, but it works better for you if you have some basic data about your prospective referral service beforehand.

Where do they get their leads? From their own marketing efforts, or from an amalgamation service (takes leads/info from lots of sources and puts them together in one searchable database, like Monster) or are the leads supplied in some other fashion? To how many of my competitors have these already been sold, or will be sold to? Does this service have a return policy? On what timeframe will you receive new, fresh leads from them? (Not necessarily the best choice having a service that supplies 200 fresh leads once every month if you have 5 salesmen to support with daily leads). Can this service benefit me in other areas? (A client referral program for example..) Will this referral service be able to support more demand from my company when the time comes? What are their current clients’ conversion ratio’s, for a similarly priced product or service as yours, when you are the referral services leads?

These and questions like them may seem obvious, as they are the questions you should be asking all your suppliers on a monthly basis, but too many people using a service seems to touch an “I trust You” button that makes common sense go away. Decide on whether to use a service by applying the most basic form of business equation – will I make more by buying and using this, or not? Then apply the same basics to determine whether or not the service is a good fit – Will I get my money's worth and what I need from them?

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