Are you waiting around for the stimulus package to miraculously jump start your business? I hope not because it will take time to see the results. What can you do in the meantime to stimulate your business and the businesses of others that costs next to nothing? Make a referral to a business you admire and ask your customers for a referral.

Duct Tape Marketing has proclaimed this Make a Referral Week. As an employee of a company that values the referral process, I thought I’d highlight the importance of tracking referrals. After all, what good is a referral if you don’t follow up?

Here are six tips to make the most out of your referrals using an online database:

• Make it easy for customers to submit referrals. Create a website form to capture referrals from your customers. Eliminate manual entry by using a web form powered by a database so submissions are automatically populated in your database.

• Ask all customers for referrals. You have nothing to lose and everything to gain. Create a drop down field in your customer database denoting whether or not a referral has been requested. This will keep your account reps honest and make it easy to identify customers who have not been approached for a referral.

• Capture the relevant referral information via flexible field types. Create a short answer field to document the name of the referral, an email field to capture the referral’s email address, a number field to record the phone number, a date field to record the date received, a paragraph field to take notes on the referral, and a drop down field to record the status (open, in progress, closed, dead).

• Be Proactive and Follow-Up. Stay on top of referrals by using the status field to create a filtered view of all OPEN referrals and have it emailed to you daily. Contact these referrals and open the call by referencing the customer who referred them. If you really want to stay on top of referrals, create an email alert to notify you every time a referral is entered.

• Be Appreciative and Thank Referrer. A simple acknowledgment is all it takes and often times when you thank referrers they will give you another referral. Create two fields to track referrer thank you: an acknowledgment drop down field (no acknowledgment, email, handwritten, and phone drop down choices) and a date sent field. Create a filtered view to identify and monitor all referrers with a status of “no acknowledgment” selected. As your volume of referrals increases, consider using a database with a built-in email campaign tool and mail merge feature to send acknowledgments.

• Monitor Referral Statistics. Use the database statistics view to determine your referral conversion rate.

Want help setting up a tracking system for your referrals? Give us a call at 1.800.673.3302, and we will get your referrals on track.