Ben Wright explains how to generate 70% of your new leads through referrals instead of traditional marketing. Ask 70 existing customers for referrals and you could land 35 new ones. The key is a three-touch process: ask at close, at delivery, and during retention.
Questions this episode answers
Episode 170.
Created 2026-01-25; last edited 2026-01-26.
Approximately 70% (35 of the needed 50 new customers).
Start with 100 customers, lose 30 to attrition (down to 70), need net +20 growth (gap of 50). If 70 customers are asked and half give one referral, that yields 35 new customers (=70% of the 50 needed).
Ask at time of close, at time of delivery, and at the retention point.
Chapters
In this episode, we will unpack how you can generate more referrals with this proven strategy. Welcome to sales Process Made simple. The show helping seven to eight figure industry construction and trade. Sales and business leaders finally end the stress of inconsistent sales by simplifying your sales systems so your team can close more deals and grow faster. I'm your host, Ben Wright, a leader who has been building businesses and sales teams just like you for the last 20 years. In this episode, we'll go through why referrals are so powerful for future lead generation activities, why many teams don't succeed at them, and the three levers you can pull to be increasing the number of referrals you get from your customers. Well, referrals, they're a topic so commonly discussed by businesses and sales teams and one that is fair to say I very rarely come across a team who don't understand what they are. However, where I think many teams fail to capitalize on referrals as so important to their business is the understanding around just what a good referral can look like for that business. And what I mean by here is that if we were looking to double our business and we said, okay, we've got a base of existing customers who will continue on over the next year, and let's say we have a natural attrition rate of 20 or 30%, and that's a reasonable number. But where to say? At the same time, we're gonna make sure that we are growing our business by 20%. So if we have 100 customers, we're gonna lose 20 to 30 of them. Let's say we lose 30 of them, right? We're down to 70, but we wanna get to a net growth number of plus 20. So a net number of 120 customers at the end of the year. So we've got a gap there of 100 minus the 30 that we are losing through attrition, plus the extra 20 that we need to get from growth. So we've got a gap here of 50 new customers. Okay, so let's say we go through those hundred customers. In fact, let's be a little bit conservative and say we go to those 70 customers and ask them for a referral. If half of Those customers make one referral to us, that is 35 new customers across the next year or the majority of our 50 new target acquisition number. Right? So 35 or 50, it's 70% of that acquisition number for the coming year. So I say that again, if we were to go to our 70 remaining customers who don't churn during the year, ask them all for referrals and get one referral from half of them. We have generated 70% of our new business for the year. Now, when you think about how hard it can be to win new customers, to be able to generate anything through referrals is a win. But when you can generate such significant numbers, it really does impact sales growth and becomes a strategy that is well worth spending a lot of time on. The problem is that for most sales teams, they're not focusing on referrals as a strategy because they are so driven by new leads being a key lever that they measure performance on. So what I mean here is that they are so focused on networking, on digital marketing, on going to trade shows, on all the traditional types of lead generation that show brand new customers into the business rather than recognizing that our existing customers are are a really effective way to bring referrals in. I also find that teams are often scared to ask for referrals because they're worried about wasting their customers time or upsetting them. When my experience in life and in business in general is that when people have a good experience with you, they're typically happy to refer you to others. In fact, at a personal level, I'm more than happy to go out of my way if I have a good experience with a brand or a product or a service to recommend it to my friends and my colleagues because I know that if I've enjoyed that experience, they'll enjoy it too. And if their life is better from it, then I'm also happy. So when we talk about referrals being a proven strategy, they are super effective at hitting new leads for our business, even when we have attrition of customers. But often we see teams who aren't prepared to ask for referrals because they're worried about upsetting their customers or simply focused on other activities. However, there's three steps that you can roll into your sales experience that make asking for referrals much, much easier. So the first piece here is we put into process three times that we're asking for referrals. And this is the main area I'll focus on today. The first area, or the first time I should say, is when we have just signed up our customer, they're really happy with our sales experience, they're ready to go, and they're looking forward to what you're about to roll out for them. This is a terrific time to say, hey, thank you very much for putting your trust in us. Is there anyone else that you think would really benefit from our service. It's a great time to roll in a gift for that customer. If they do it, hey, in return, we'll do this, we'll provide you a discount, we'll provide you x percent off your next service, we'll provide your friend a discount. Right. It's a terrific time to do that. But generally we want to be asking for referrals at the time when a customer is most happy with what we're doing. So at closing is number one, the second one is at delivery. So when we've delivered a really good product, a really good service and they're happy with what we've got, that is a fantastic time to say, hey, is there anyone else you know that would benefit from our services? Particularly if you're a small business, a family run business, where you're able to say, our business is built on referrals from customers like you, Is there anyone you might know that would really enjoy our service? Or even more impactfully is when they were referred by someone and you ask the question that says, hey, is there anyone else, as you were referred to us, is there anyone else who might really benefit from using our service? And the last point here is around asking for a referral at the retention point. At the retention point. It's one I've read recently by Robert Scrob. I'd highly recommend it. But the retention point is all about when you feel your customer has reached the point where they are buying into what you're doing. This isn't necessarily at sales close or at operational delivery. Sometimes it's after they've been using our product for a period of time. They might have had a good win, they might have embedded it into their lives. They might have had a time to enjoy the product or service. But it's recognising when that retention point is and asking for the referral then. So three times is how I see great sales teams ask for referrals. Number one at time of close, number two at time of delivery, and number three is at time of retention point. To recap, most businesses aren't asking for referrals because they're so focused on other parts of lead generation. But those who are, and those who really do double down on seeing referrals as a key pillar of their lead generation strategies, often find that a lot of their new business comes for referrals. And they then need to spend less time chasing some of the really hard referral yards. Those yards when customers are cold, they don't know their business, they've had no introduction to them. And so in essence are less likely to close versus when they're being referred in right are referred from someone they trust and in essence are more likely to close because that relationship can be built quicker. So typically, when do we see great teams asking for referrals? It's at the time of close, it's at the time of delivery and then lastly at the retention point, that time when we think customers have really bought into what we do. So that's the key takeaway from today. Referrals are an exceptional way to grow businesses. And if you're not rolling out referrals in your business, the the key takeaway from today for you is how can you get your team focusing just that little bit more on referrals? Do you need to think about having a different team do it? Should your customer service team do it? Or if you don't have other teams that could do it, how could you be doing it better? Through your salespeople or if you don't have a sales team, could you set up any automation into your business that could roll out referrals or simply make more calls yourself? Schedule out time in your calendar where you're really regularly ringing your customers and asking for referrals. Because if every referral we bring in is going to be a higher close rate than cold leads, at the end of the day, we are going to be so much better off through this 1% better approach through this 1% better approach around generating referrals and really focusing on growing our business. So that's it for today. Very grateful as always to have you listening. We drop podcasts every Monday, Wednesday and Friday. Keep up the focus on being 1% better each and every day. It will make the difference. Look forward to seeing you in the next episode. But that's it for today. Bye for now. Are you struggling to grow your monthly sales numbers? Feel like you've reached a sales ceiling, are involved in every deal, or have no real sales system in place to help you grow? And is that causing a level of worry or stress about how you can get more sales in the future? If that's you, that's exactly why we created the sold Out Sales Teams program to help you get month on month sales growth with less stress. In just the first week, we will lock down your quoting process to grow sales by 25 to 30%. And that's just week one. And for the first three podcast listeners that we speak to this week, we'll offer you a bonus one on one strategy session with me to make sure you can pay off your investment even faster. Which, by the way, for most businesses is only one or two extra sales to book in, click the link in our Show Notes. It's a direct calendar link so you can instantly confirm your meeting time.
