You’ve probably learned that cold outbound campaigns don’t have the same luster they previously had, and are looking for a new way to generate qualified lead volume. Good news, with the right preparation and a few easy to access tools, you can create a system that leverages your own network to generate meetings!
At InnerCircle we’ve built a suite of Referral Management Solutions that help you generate meetings with significantly better conversion rates than any cold outbound strategy. Our system is built to help you use your LinkedIn connections to get you access to every prospective lead within your ICP! For those looking to get started, here are the five steps crucial to setting up a high-performing referral system.
Step 1) Subscribe to LinkedIn Sales Navigator. Sales Navigator is a MUST HAVE tool for any referral initiative. LinkedIn has built a user base over 1 billion users and its sales tool, Sales Navigator, leverages open graph technology to show if and how its users are connected to each and every one of those billion users. It’s designed specifically for sales professionals and offers a massive range of lead and account search filters so you can build hyper targeted lead lists (more on that below), and identifies all potential paths to a given lead so you can make decisions on who to reach out to, and when you should reach out.
Step 2) Review your LinkedIn connections: Disclaimer, this is a manual process, but a critical one to setting your referral initiative up for success. Just like any marketing campaign, you want to ultimately match your ad copy to your target audience, and to save time you should create groups of mutuals based on their personal characteristics (e.g. college classmates, work colleagues, mentors and executives, do not contact, and even, random LinkedIn connections). Then you should export your LinkedIn connections and tag each individual in your network based on the correct grouping. Ultimately, this will help you match your personalized referral request message to the individual and ultimately increase your response rate and your likelihood for success with your lead.
Step 3) Write your referral requests: Now that you’ve created groupings of your mutuals, you should write a distinct referral request for each grouping that speaks in the appropriate tone and provides the appropriate amount of context for your given audience. A few key tips to writing great referral requests are:
- Keep it concise
- Lead with your direct request
- Provide brief, but specific context on why you want the introduction and why it’s valuable for all parties involved
- Be polite, gracious and empathetic!
- People are busy, don’t forget to say thank you!
Step 4) Build your lead lists: The most critical component of this process is to ensure that your lead lists are targeting the final decision-makers within the companies you’re trying to access, your lists are organized by a defining characteristic (e.g. company industry or company size), and are mutually exclusive of one another (i.e. individuals are only on one lead list at a time). This will help you avoid situations where multiple introduction requests are sent to the same lead.
Step 5) Build a system to track every interaction: The final step before you start sending your outreach is to ensure you have a system where you can log each referral request that you send, and track the status of each request across each stage in the funnel. This will allow you to easily follow-up with each mutual and ensure each person who agrees to make an intro, follows through. A couple common pitfalls to avoid are:
- Avoid over-asking any individual in your network for introductions; at InnerCircle we set a default frequency cap of 90 days for all requests
- Ensure that you don’t have multiple requests out for introductions to the same lead at the same time. This is especially important if you have multiple people in your organization seeking referrals.
There’s a lot to get right here, but you can build out a process that delivers >100x performance and response compared to cold email if you follow these five tips! If this feels overwhelming and challenging to set-up manually (it is!), please reach out for a demo of the InnerCircle platform where we do all the heavy lifting for you!