Perhaps you have sat in an audience watching a sales awards ceremony and been spellbound by the acceptance speeches as the winners talked about their success. If you were struggling at the time, their success may have looked like magic. And you wanted to know how they did it. How did they pull all those sales out of the hat?

The truth is, if their sales came from strong referrals, they may not really know how they did it. Or, they may know what worked and be unwilling to share it. They may want the secrets behind their magic to remain hidden.

This is especially true when professionals plan and benefit their referrers exceptionally well. They may want it to look easier than it really was. But you can bet there was much more at play than saying the magic words and just asking for referrals. There was likely a give and take and a sequence of things that happened that made their referral relationships work. There is no real magic that can make the perfect referrals suddenly appear.

The Magic Is In Relationships
If you want referrals, you should look past finding which words will work and look instead at what makes relationships work. Referral relationships work like other relationships work. Think about your relationships with people in your neighborhood. Just image the neighbors on your block and their willingness to help you if your car broke down.

Each might respond differently, depending on your relationship. One might refuse to help and even be rude. One might share the name of a mechanic. Another might be willing to take you to the garage. And one might be a mechanic and insist on fixing it at no cost.

These are very different levels of willingness to help. Your willingness to help would differ for each person, too. Your requests for help would be dependent on your history with each of them and you might not even be sure why you would or wouldn’t ask.

Your request and their response would be based on a history of mutual benefits. If your request included an offer to benefit them, your request and their response would be based on the anticipation of benefits. But your success would have little to do with how you asked.

“Just Asking” Is Not The Magic
The magic is not in how you ask for referrals. At some level of consciousness, people who sell know the magic is somewhere else. It is true that sometimes just asking for referrals will work. However, the real magic is in the quality of the relationship you have not the technique you use.

Like a good magic show, successfully getting ideal referrals with strong introductions from influential people involves planning, preparation, and practice. It may look as easy as waving a wand, but the magic is in building the benefits that result in good relationships. Be sure you do the planning required for your top referrers. The result will be a razzle-dazzle of benefits for you, your referrers, and your new clients!

Twice in the last week insurance clients have called to say that they lost their number one account. In one case it cost the agent $80,000 in lost commissions and in the other the loss was over $50,000. In both cases these agents had maintained these accounts for several years. So what happened?

We could speculate as to why these agents lost this business, but we will never really be sure. However, both cases share some common threads. Both accounts originally started with the agent dealing one on one with the owner. As time passed and the businesses grew, the owners became less involved in the insurance decisions and delegated those decisions to a staff member. The agent was essentially handed off to someone with whom they had little or no relationship.

As each of these agents related their side of the story to me, it became apparent that the agent had mistakenly assumed that they no longer needed to nurture, strengthen and grow the relationships within the company. They essentially had taken the existing relationship for granted and had failed to realize that they needed to continue to “court and woo” their client. It is the same mistake that marriage partners make when they begin to take their spouse for granted.

A parable explains this well. A man who was dying was presented with the option of visiting both heaven and hell to see where he would like to spend eternity.

When he visited heaven he observed a very serene and peaceful atmosphere. The streets were paved with gold and angels floated through the air playing harps and cellos. People munched on nectar and fruit and were friendly, though somewhat sedated and tranquil. Not a bad place at all.

When he visited hell he was shocked. Instead of fire and brimstone there were people dancing and partying and drinking. There was a great variety and abundance of sumptuous and delectable foods. People were laughing and telling jokes and it reminded him of his college fraternity days.

When it came time to choose, he chose hell. You can’t really blame him can you?

When he died and got there it was horrible. People were wailing and screaming. It was miserably hot and not a drop of water to be had. The only food available were scraps that people fought over viciously.

Unable to comprehend what had happened he asked his host, “When I took the tour there were people dancing and partying and drinking. There was a great variety and abundance of sumptuous and delectable foods. People were laughing and telling jokes. What happened?”

With a grin on his face and a gleam in his eye his host responded and said, “before you were a prospect now you are a client.”

The moral: The way you keep clients is to treat them, after they become a customer, the same as you did before they became a customer.

Buying is an emotional decision. People buy emotionally and then justify their decision intellectually. For proof of this look at the advertising business. Michelin Tire Company became the number one tire company in the world when they put that baby in the tire. People who buy Michelins are not buying four-ply vulcanized rubber. They are buying trust, safety and security, all of which are emotions. Those are some of the same emotions people rely on when they buy anything.

Here are some statistics for you. All studies of human motivation conclude that people buy from people they trust and respect. As much as 50 to 80 percent of the reason people buy anything has to do with trust and respect. When people buy your product, chances are that they don’t fully comprehend the technical aspects of what you sell. What they do understand is that they feel comfortable, trust and respect the person they are talking with. The greatest skill any sales professional can develop is the ability to connect or bond with the prospect emotionally.

North American Companies spend about two billion dollars each year on sales training hoping for an improvement in their bottom line. Most of the time they don’t get it.

In 1998, according to the American Society for Training and Development, only nineteen (19%) of people who took a training course received any kind of sustained performance improvement. There have been numerous articles in many publications, which confirm that premise.

Why?

Because they try to put “new wine in an old wineskin” thinking that it will work. What they get is the same old results. Hang with me and let me explain what I mean. When I was in graduate school I was taught that the purpose of education was to produce behavioral change in the learner. Sadly, most of the sales training being conducted today does not produce any permanent skill enhancement or behavioral change in the participants.

Why is this?

Most training being taught today is information based. That is it is presented from an intellectual or factual point of view. The shortcoming of this type of learning methodology is that the human brain forgets most new information that it is exposed to rather quickly. In fact, psychologists tell us that we consciously forget 95% of what we hear at a seminar within twenty-one days of hearing it. Yes, we heard it and we intellectually understood it but we didn’t retain it and we certainly can’t execute or implement it a month later. The flaw is in the learning model not in the content.

But we are an instant gratification society. We want to hear it once or twice and then expect to be an expert at it. That is not the way the brain works.

Think about how you learned the multiplication tables. You practiced it over and over and over again. You did drills and flash cards for weeks and weeks until new neuropathways were created chemically and electrically in your brain. The same thing with learning to ride a bike. You did not one day take a lesson and then hop on a bike and take off. Like most of us you had to practice and fall down and repeat the process over and over until one day your neurological system “got it” and then you owned the skill for life.

Selling is the same way except it is more difficult than learning to ride a bike or memorizing the multiplication tables. Companies, managers and sales people all want to short cut the process. They want an easy, fast, painless method that does not exist and they continue to be seduced by the promise of the one-day miracle seminar or the magic book or tape. The result is that the sales profession has become inundated with hacks, incompetents, product peddlers and pitchmen who aren’t much better than the elixir con men who once operated out of the back of a covered wagon.

Many of the world’s best sales forces are the best because they have developed and use a systematic sales process. Having a map of the things we as salespeople have to do to make a sale provides a framework for sales planning and activity that reduces mistakes and shortens new hire ramp-up time.

However, what is conspicuously absent from most of these process maps are the things that our prospective customers have to do each step of the way in order to buy. The truth is that the things we do at any particular step or stage in the process could be a complete waste of time if the client doesn’t do what they must do to move forward to the next step or stage in their buying process.

As sales professionals, you and I don’t retire quota or earn commissions for anything that we do. We get paid on what our prospects do. When they sign a contract or issue a purchase order, then we make some money. This is the root of one of the major challenges of selling. We have to accept that we cannot control our prospects.

As sales people or managers we often ask, “What do we have to do to close this deal?” That, in fact, is the wrong question. What we should be asking is, “What does the prospect have to do in order to buy?” and then the follow-on question is, “What do we have to do to get them to do those things?”

Whether or not we have or follow a systematic sales process, we should endeavor to understand and document our client’s buying process. We must understand not only the things that have to happen throughout the selection and approval process, but who will be involved along the way.

Armed with a thorough understanding of the steps and stages of our prospects buying process, we can plan our work accordingly. Then every single move we make can be made with the specific intent of enabling or empowering our prospect to take the next step they need to take in order to buy.

If you think about it a minute, before we speak to a prospective prospect on the phone we should know and understand exactly what has to happen next in their buying process, and what we’re going to do on this call to make that happen. And if we spend the time and money to go visit a prospect without a plan of what we intend to say and do to help them take the next step in their buying process, then we are little more than a professional visitor.

Defining and documenting a useful map of our prospects buying process will take time, it will take effort, and it will require that we reach, qualify, and sell to all of the people who will play a part in the selection and approval process. We will need a lot of input and perspective because simply accepting any one person’s opinion of their process leaves too many variables to chance and ultimately leaves us with too much exposure and opportunity for failure. Taking the time to thoroughly understand all of the things that the prospect needs to do in order to buy often makes the difference between the very successful and those who simply get by.