Each on of these guys wants to grow their business.

Jordan would like to hire a salesperson but needs sales revenues to pay for it. Hence, a chicken and egg dilemma.

Luke and Jake have hired salespeople before but experienced little to no production.

James has money to hire a salesperson but has yet to do so.

My Company, Butler Services Group, is working to build a custom “Referral Engine” for Luke, Jake, Jordan and James as an alternative to hirering new sales people.

This Referral Engine will take each companies Customer Community and Strategic Partners and turn then into a willing and happy sales team that produces Leads and Opportunities.

Accounts are businesses who have paid Luke, Jake, Jordan or James in exchange for their products or services.

Contacts are human beings that Luke, Jake, Jordan or James work with at these businesses who pay for services.

Strategic Partners are companies who serve Accounts and Contacts that fit Luke, Jake, Jordan and James’ Ideal Customer Profile and do so in a complimentary way.

Leads are Human beings whose behavior indicates that they are interested in a particular companies products or services.

Opportunities are any sales deals that need to be tracked and closed.

With a Referral Engine, Leads and Opportunities will be purposefully cultivated from a companies existing Customer Community and Strategic Partnerships.

This cultivation of Leads and Opportunities happens Online….

…and Offline

Its important to make it easy for the customer community and strategic partners to tell other humans about how great Luke, Jake, Jordan and James are. To do that we need to build out the above infrastructure.

This chart shows how many Accounts and Contacts each business owner has.

Its important to know how big your customer community is and to have as much intelligence about them as possible.

# of Accounts are the Left Column# of Contacts are the right Column.

This chart shows how many Strategic Partnerships each business owner currently has.

The more strategic partners the better. But remember, business owners should think of what they can do for their partner first…and think of what is in it for them second.

In theory, strategic partners will produce more Leads and Opportunities than the Customer Community. Yet, both are important to a well oiled Referral Engine.

This is a timeline that shows the life cycle of the “Ideal Customer”

The Ideal Customer is well defined by the Customer Persona that was mentioned earlier as part of the infrastructure.

A “Referral” happens when your Customer Community or Strategic Partner lends his/her trust in the business owner to a Lead.

When this happens the “KNOW” and “LIKE” stages in the life cycle are bypassed and the “Risk” of doing business with the business owner is dramatically lessened.

Why a Referral Engine? Well, compared to a sales team, Referral Engines are less expensive, less risky and have absolutely no time capacity. A well oiled Referral Engine works 24/7.