My Most Excellently Flawed Referral Survey

  • Home
  • /
  • Blog
  • /
  • My Most Excellently Flawed Referral Survey

Last week, as part of some research for a book I’m working on, I sent out a survey to readers of this blog and my newsletter and I was floored by the response (Sorry to those who found the survey closed, I just didn’t anticipate thousands would flock to it so fast)

I got exactly what I was looking for with one exception.

First off – here’s what I asked
1) What percentage of your business would you attribute to some form of referral or word of mouth?
2) Do you have a well-defined system to promote referral generation in your business?
3) If you are not systematically receiving a consistent stream of referrals, what is in the way?
4) Of the referrals you receive do most come from . . .
5) I have been in business for . . .

First off the validations – 69.3% felt over 50% of their business came by way of referral and yet, 79.9 further admitted they had no well-defined system to promote referral generation. So, we know the power of referral, but we don’t develop proactive processes to take advantage. I actually had a hunch on these numbers because I hear this every day. By the way, it varied little from over 10 years in business to less than 3 years in business.

Now, what I was really trying to learn is why for heavens sake . . . and that’s where I flawed my results. Q3 – If you are not systematically receiving a consistent stream of referrals, what is in the way? – puzzled people so much that over 20% of the respondents skipped the question. To give you some perspective less than 1/2 of 1% skipped any other question.

Now, one thing was clear from the dozens of emails I got on this one, I should have had an other or I get enough referrals, but judging from some of the very long, passionate emails I got, this is a subject of significant importance in the puzzle and I’m going to push, challenge, explore and otherwise make people uncomfortable and accountable on this one in the book.

Here’s your shot – what’s in the way of you getting a steady stream of referrals in your business. What’s holding you back from getting referrals from every single customer and dozens of strategic partners? Please share your thoughts.


Tags


You may also like

Rakaweb