GET AN INTRODUCTION: Build Relationships and Ask for Referrals with Christoph Karger

Every company has breakdowns in their revenue process. Sure thing. Deals slip into next quarter, competitors creep in and swipe deals away at the last minute, and deals getting single threaded that don't get to power. These are just a few examples of revenue leak, but there are a ton more and they're preventing your team from reaching their sales targets. That's why I'm such a big fan of Clary's Revenue platform is the only tool that actually helps leaders take control of their revenue and thrive through any market conditions. Especially when things get tough. You can't afford to miss a single detail, but you also can't be leading by gut. Clary combines the science and the art of sales and sales leadership. So go to clary.com if you want to answer the most important question in your business. Are you going to meet beat or Miss on revenue?

Welcome to the live Better Sell Better podcast with your host Kevin Dorsey of Inside Sales Excellence, the number one Patreon group and YouTube channel for tech sellers and tech sales leaders where we dive in deep for tactical advice on how to book more meetings, close more deals faster, and lead sales teams to success. But we don't stop there. We also focus on the person in salesperson. We talk about mindset goals, time management and so much more. So thank you for listening and if you're interested, head on over to patreon.com InsideSalesExcellence now with that, grab a notepad, get ready and let's dive into the good stuff.

What up everybody? Welcome to a special Costa Rican edition of the live Better Sell Better podcast. This is your host Kevin Dorsey, AKA akd. And today we are going to talk about, truthfully, one of the most overlooked revenue and pipeline generating channels that I see in SaaS that I see nobody talking about. Very few companies have structured processes around it and what's hilarious is this channel closes at the highest clip, has lower churn, has higher deal sizes and easier to get in touch with. Yet no buddy seems to do it. And the channel I'm talking about are referrals, introductions from your customer base and maybe even not your customers. Warm intros to people that are a good fit for your product. And that is why I'm so excited to have Christoph Koger on the show with me today. He's the VP of Sales over at Sparks. He's a sales coach at Highrise Academy, a part of Pavilion, like all in it. And he's going to talk about referrals. How do you do it? How do you incentivize? How do you ask who do you ask? And how can you make this a revenue channel for your org? So. So hope y' all are ready to dive in. Christoph, welcome to the show.

Thank you very much. Super excited to be here. And let's dive right in.

Let's go, let's go. So when I can't remember, it was. It was a post or something, right, where you reached out saying like, hey, can I come and talk about referrals? And I was like, yes, because I just believe in this so much. But bring us back here. Why are referrals something so top of mind for you? Like, why do you think referrals are so important?

Well, I think there's two sides to it. So it's basically how I started in sales and then secondly, how I think things are developing in sales right now. So let me just go back to give you a heads up. When I started in sales, I started in financial advising, and I was basically selling insurances, financial products, financial advising to people in my own network. And one thing is very clear, if you don't want to do that, there's only one way to get out of there, and that's referrals. And so that was something that we were taught quite early, basically to leverage in every opportunity that we have. And that worked apparently well. And years later, when I moved into software sales, I didn't have a head of sales on the ground. He just left. And we didn't have territory. So all the accounts were kind of claimed. And I thought, well, what were the things in pipeline building that actually worked before? And so I basically took the concept and applied them and figured out what worked well, what you could transfer and the things that you probably couldn't transfer. And this worked very well for myself. And then later on, I teached it, I taught it to my teams and worked with other companies around those things. And I figured out a couple of concepts that are very easy to apply and to duplicate.

Yeah, just jump in there real quick. Something I love about that is how often things that we learn in other industries transfer over to SaaS. Like, everyone always thinks you have to have SaaS experience to sell SaaS, when in reality it's like you have good experience outside of SaaS that you can bring in some of those best practices. So I love that. Okay, keep going. I just wanted to call that out.

And the second thing that I see happening right now is I don't know how many touch points we need by now on average to get in front of our prospect. I think in 2021, where there was about 18 to get a response. I think that was a sales cycle statistic. And it's like 18 touch points to get a response. It's like, where is this going? 25, 37. You know, the emails and the touch points that really develop, deliver value and really deliver insights are not getting the attention they deserve. So it's kind of logical consequence that we need to find new ways to speak to our prospect. And then there comes one statistic into play which I still think is shocking. Like, 91% of buyers would give referrals and only 11% of salespeople actually asked for them. And in the context of knowing that 84% of sales start with referrals anyways, regardless if we ask for them or not. It's just something we have to dive into. And I think it's the next big thing, because personalized intros, I'm just getting much more attention.

I. I've talked about this on a couple podcasts. I got to test this a little bit, actually, at my last role, I'm about to do it again of like, customer led growth. Who would a prospect rather talk to? An SDR or a customer? An AE or a customer. Right. Like, they want to talk to people like them using it. So, okay, let's keep going down here. So, like, where does this start? How do you go about asking for referrals? Because you just called it out. 91% of buyers are willing to. Less than 12%, I think. Right. You said only 11% of buyers actually ask. So let's start with how do you ask for a referral? And let's work from there.

Yeah, I would even start a step earlier because I think the main question is why don't we ask? And I don't have the complete answer to it, but whenever I ask do a training on this topic, I feel like only a couple of people raised their hand. Yeah, I actually ask for referrals. Most of them ask something like, hey, next time you see someone having this challenge, think about me. But that does nothing more than checking a box. And I don't know if people have said to have an issue asking because they feel they already asked for the deal or they already asked for a lot. But if we speak about the mindset, I think referrals should be the most common thing ever because we're giving them all the time. I mean, you said it before, right? You're sitting in Costa Rica. If I go to Costa Rica next week, the first thing I'm going to do is if we're in good relationship. I'm going to ask you, hey, by the way, I'm in Costa Rica, what should I do? The next time you work in the movies and you tell your friends about them, the first thing they're going to ask is, oh, amazing. How was it same with restaurants, experience, travel and even software products? We do them all the time. And so also asking for that referral should be the most normal thing ever because we already have our prospect.

And what's interesting there too, and you mentioned this actually early on, something I do think in SAS has made referrals harder are territories. Because I do know that people are like, well, I'm going to ask for referral, but it's going to be outside of my territory. Why would I ask for this referral? It's not even going to go to like it almost over complicates it sometimes. Like there's some territories where people can refer into, there's other territories where they're referring out all the time. So I do think that bubbles up sometimes too.

That is a challenge and it's something that every revenue team basically has to tackle individually. But I think referrals should be a team sport. Also not saying that always the sales rep has to ask for referral or the SDR sometimes. If we're speaking about a later stage, why doesn't customer success ask for referral? And of course that referral goes back to the SDR who initially sourced the deal. It should be a no brainer. And so it should also be a no brainer that if I have a referral in another territory that I handed over or that we find agreement that referrals basically come first or personal introductions. Think both of that are solutions that are. That work just fine.

Yeah. So do you think there's like a fear element involved here of like, well, I'm afraid to ask for a referral, you know, because they haven't used the product yet or I'm afraid, you know, they might say no, like let's keep going down that path. A little bit of like, I love always looking at like what prevents it. Why should I say why are people afraid to ask? Because it's true, this is very simple to do, but there is, there's a fear element. What do you think brings that up in people?

I think it's so the fear element I can't really answer because I haven't discovered myself. However, in the beginning I felt, well, I already asked for the deal, felt like that's already a big ask. So I asked for their Signature. And I felt like, well, asking for more, isn't that a bit over the top, a bit too much? While actually, if you think about it, the opposite should be true. Because my prospect or my customer had a big challenge, had a problem that we are solving, and so they're having more revenue, they have better processes, they have more time regardless. So making that referral should be the most common thing. And actually it's also the feedback that I'm getting is when I'm asking for referrals, usually very, very positive. But I think it's more the being aware of it and being fully present in the. Being fully in the moment when you have an opportunity to ask for referrals, to actually do it and not to make it like a checkbox in the end or the last thing that we then in the end don't do in that call. I think it's also something that I see when I speak to managers. For example, most managers didn't do this themselves. So how do we actually train it? So if we walk through our call recordings, we always look at how great we did an intro, how great we did the middle part in the end. But I rarely saw someone ask, well, look, there was a great opportunity to ask for referrals. Why didn't we do that?

We're going to get into the system I built for my team because that was something that was like we harped on, like we measured it. What percentage of calls did we ask for, the introductions and referrals? So we'll go there. So actually then, before we get into how, let's keep going down this path. So when, when are some of the best times to ask for referrals? Because you hinted at it a little bit already too. This isn't a one and done. It isn't like you just ask once and then that's it. So, like, when do you like to ask for referrals from customers?

I think it depends a lot. And I think the question also is, what are we considering Referral, Right. Referral might be something which is just using a name to reach out. Or for example, if we're in a cold call and we just know, hey, it's the one contact person, but we know someone else is there. We got a little information that they might have that challenge. So in that particular moment, it might be enough to just ask if it's okay to use their name. While later on, if they are at the end of the customer experience of the buying process, it might be totally fine to ask them to write an Intro. So I think the moments really differ a lot. And technically we can leverage any moment of excitement that our prospect has and it can be in the discovery where we just realize, hey, we're just not the right fit for each other. Totally fine. But they still had a great conversation with you. It can be at a later stage when you're in a negotiation. For example, I love this part of negotiations. Like they ask for discount and ask you most likely give it anyways. It's like, what are they bringing to the party? What can we get in return? This can be a referral. This can also be a use case or their logo. But all of that goes kind of in the same direction or paths or later on when they hit certain milestones in the process. Signature after onboarding Happiness calls. I just personally like to call after some time to ask for feedback and just because I really want that feedback on their experience. And that usually leads to a conversation which is then leading to referrals.

No, I love that. Right? So funny. I'll share this. So at my last company, I'll probably do it again here. I actually increased list price so we had more room to discount so that we could offer a bigger discount for introductions. Right. And so I hope you all caught it. It's not always just saying like an intro, like, hey, can you introduce us? It's also, it could be a list of names. It could be just being able to use their name. Right. Reaching out on behave. I worked with someone, you know, Christoph. Da, da, da da. Like, there's different ways, but we built it in where even if someone was willing to pay full price and this is what throws people off, even if a customer is willing to pay full price, we still offered the discount. Like quite literally. Like, someone's ready to go. They're like, yep, sign me up. Let's get it. Awesome. Okay, so you know the total is going to be 15,000. We'll get you set up. Now, if you'd be willing to share five names of me with me, I can knock that down to 14,000. Is that something you'd be interested in? I already have agreement to the full price and now we're actually using it. As for, I'd rather close every deal with five names at a discount than every deal at full price and still have to go out cold. And then those moments that matter. And so, okay, so now let's start to get into the how of it a little bit because I think that's what goes through people's head is like, okay, so then what do I just say? Hey, no. Any know anybody? Hey, what do I do? Right. So let's say, let's do two examples here. Let's use one. Like at the close, like, how are you asking? Because you talked about negotiation, which is my favorite time to bring it up. But also like, like that happiness call.

Right.

Or they've been part of it for a few months, Things seem to be going well. So break down. Like how you go about asking for referrals of those two different points.

Yeah. So when we speak about the, let's say the happiness call, because I think that's actually the most easy one and also the one that you can scale the best within the company, because everybody has those touch points after signature, technically the question is only who does them? And what I like to do is basically just call them and ask them for proper feedback first of all, and not for the sake of getting them say something like, yeah, I'm super happy, et cetera. Really, like, because I really want to improve and their feedback is really important to improve my customer journey and to see where I can adjust the touch points. From there, I'd usually just simply ask. It's like, hey, by the way, when you're that excited about the product, when you're that happy with the service, when your experience is that positive, it's really awesome. How do you feel about generally making a recommendation about this product? So if someone comes to their mind that they would make that introduction, I think what's very important is we need to be prepared here. Meaning we need to have narrowed down our ICP and to know what to ask for. Meaning if I would ask you, hey, kd, by the way, if you come upon someone who has the same challenge as you, just think about me, you know, who might benefit from coaching. Just think about me, who might, you know, that doesn't really do as much than checking a box. But if I narrow it down to my ICP saying, hey, by the way, if you agree to make that recommendation generally and ask, you're awesome. So I'm looking for. And then really narrow down my ICP to like, I'm looking to speak to head of sales at software as a service companies, this funding size, etc. Maybe someone who's similar like them, maybe someone different. Usually it narrows down the path a bit more to think about someone in particular. And then we have two options. They come up with, yeah, sure, there might be someone awesome and we can really speak about this person, ask them why they come up with them, get some more information about them and sometimes comes, yeah, sure, I think about it, I'll let you know. We cannot do something about the second pass. But being prepared about that. What do I mean by that? And I think this is something which is really powerful is I developed this concept of gross and net referrals, meaning gross referrals. We know it's basically taxes, we know they are there, but we didn't qualify them yet. And net referrals, we have a qualified contact strategy to reach out to them and if we made notes during our calls, how they make decisions and what kind of networks they are active, I mean those kind of information is relevant for me anyways. Who they speak to, when they, when they, when they want to make a decision or when they want to get information, how they want to stay ahead of trends in the industry. It's like me being in pavilion. Like I speak to people there and when I look for something I probably check that area out, check that network out. And so that way I can kind of narrow it down and ask for specific people. And of course that's the last step. I can also use Sales Navigator to just see who's connected to whom and type in my ICP and then ask for specific people. And with a little bit of research I also know, I mean now there's people who have ten thousands of contacts. Of course we know we don't know everybody in person, but with a little bit of research I can see, oh, they might have worked together or they might have been together at university. They might have, I don't know, attended an event together. So there might be a chance that they actually know each other.

Yeah, that's one of my favorite processes to go through is what heavy lifting can I do for them? Can I look at their connections? Who do we have shared connections? Can I look at their background? Say, hey, it looks like you worked with, you know, Sarah over there. Could you make an intro? I'll write the email. Like we had email templates built, right. So that they could just send it on our behalf like as any place that we can to make it easier for them, I think is the key now keep going. Sounds like you have something else to add there.

No, I think the point you just put up is exactly what's happening next is, I mean, just saying, just knowing there is someone doesn't bring us there. Also, if they made. I think there's three things to it. First is we're not just going to ask, right? Usually it's, you know, we know those people just ask for an Introduction, you know, and we don't know who they are. So we should also explain why we want to speak to them, why it is important for them that we actually get that introduction. Because we are all worried about our network, about our reputation. And if I make an introduction to someone, I want to ensure that it's a good introduction that delivers value and quality. So I think that's the one part there that's also important, then the second is staying in control of it. Meaning you're not just asking once you kind of build a little cadence around it. You said one point you had templates written. Exactly. It has to be as easy as possible. They can just use that. I write that template, I write that message for them, that LinkedIn message, that email, let them CC me, makes it much more easier to just reply to that email or to call them later, etc. And then of course, also not just once. I send them a little reminder. Hey, by the way, I haven't seen that email. Did you send it actually? Did you hear any feedback? I might call them. And what I also like to do is just send a little handwritten note. Hey, thank you very much, Appreciate the help. It means a lot to me, maybe. I mean, I work for Sparks and we send sparkling wine, so send that bottle over anyways, so. But those kind of things then also make a difference because I think the other question that we didn't get dive into was just a reminder for ourselves. Are we actually delivering a referral service and are we actually outstanding that someone would make that intro?

No, I think that's key because it is. I love the old school, the physical. Right. Writing that note, sending a gift, sending a bottle. Right. Things like that stand out to people of like, wow, like I gave the referral, but then they still went above and beyond for me in some way. Do you heavily incentivize it? Because I think that gets brought up too. It's like, how do we incentivize our customers? And like, you'll see things like, oh, you know, get a hundred dollars off your next month or something like which I have my own thoughts on. How do you think about incentivizing referrals? Or is it mostly just goodwill, good nature, you make the ask. As long as you are providing a.

Valuable service, I think both is totally fine. I don't believe that someone ever made a referral because your local bank offered, I don't know, a hammer as a gift because you brought in a customer. I don't think that ever happened. But having a referral share that you give back to someone is something that I think is totally fair and can even build revenue streams for some people. So if you're willing to give back a couple of percentages of your revenue to someone who makes you a couple of infos, I wouldn't do that for someone who just does one intro. But if you work closely together and you get a couple of introductions, that's totally fine. I used to have that at a previous company with some other reps and they brought in constant referrals and it was pretty good, I think, pretty good deal for both sides. I'm not a fan of just giving a $10 discount on a subscription fee just for one introduction because I think it should happen anyways. And usually it happens anyways. It's more the over topic of not being there even if you already made that sign up or a sale. Building the relationship, maintaining the relationship, saying hi to birthdays, you know, those kind of little things that should be totally normal. But I think most people in software sales, but maybe also because we have this role split often just see their role as I'm part of this is my journey and everything before and after I don't take care of. And I think that's something that could be a mistake. Leave that for discussion.

I was just going to go there because if I think back to some of my top reps, they stayed in touch with their customers even though they weren't supposed to. Like, and I hear this all the time where it says like, well, I'm not allowed to reach out to my customers once they are closed because now they're in cs and I'm like, that is ridiculous. Ridiculous, right? Like, so you have to stay in touch. And I do think you were just talking about this, this, this singular road mentality of like, well, I already closed it, so now it's in CS's world and I don't get to do those things. I do think is really, really foolish because we should be staying in touch with our customers because that allows for the referrals to come through regularly. And to your point, if you're going to incentivize it and that you mentioned it, it's got to be a good, good deal for both sides, right? Because I think it's hilarious that we'll spend tens of thousands of dollars on leads and then an SDR to call it and pay them to book it and then the AE to work it and to close it and we pay all the managers all that, that cost of acquisition, $5,000 $10,000. Then we'll offer a customer $100 gift card for referring someone. It's like, make the math the same where if I knew, like, dang, like, I'm going to get a year for free if I can get them two customers, game over. I'm gonna go get you those two customers because now I'm getting it for free. And so you got to make the incentive really strong, in my opinion, if you're going to do it. Otherwise, it just actually feels kind of like. It almost feels grimy, you know, like, oh, here's a 10 gift card for an introduction. You're like, no, I don't got time for that.

No, definitely fully agree. But I think it's something which is scalable. And for example, I'm working on this right now because I think there is a lot of value in there. So I think it's something that's definitely worth looking into for organizations.

So then just like any skill or any tactic, right? This has to be coached. This has to be taught. It's like, how did you teach your teams how to do this? How did you coach them? How did you develop the skill of this, like, as a leader? Because it's one thing that I think probably even a lot of people listening right now, they're like, yeah, this makes a lot of sense. We still really haven't done it. How did you enable your team? How did you coach them? How did you make sure this was actually happening?

Yeah, I think this is the most difficult one because there's so many different touch points where we can actually ask for referrals. And we have to be very patient because it's like any other skill that we practice. It requires patience. It requires practice and a lot of repetition to really also incorporate that mindset of, okay, I'm going to do this whenever possible, basically, and. Or leverage every opportunity that I get to do this. The second is, I think, is constant training and repetition and making it part of. For example, we have those core reviews basically, when we speak about check where we check boxes around. Okay, did you do this? Do you this where can you prove what can you keep, what should you start doing, et cetera? And I've never seen any where this was a part of. So also making this part of every habit, make this part of every meeting, speak about it constantly as look at the sources where we generated pipeline from and just make it present. I don't think it's like any other thing. If we speak about it, it's going to become a priority and it's just the thing that we most often don't do it. And it's also funny when I host a training, I had one a couple of weeks ago and I was doing a follow up conversation with them four weeks later. And I think only 20% of people actually did something around it. They had remarkable results. The other ones didn't. And it's the same thing with our own teams. We can tell them once and they're not doing it. I think you recently spoke about micromanagement on the podcast and a blueprint for success. Right. It's kind of the same thing. It's like we can, you can tell you what to do, but you have to execute it in the end. And I think as leaders, we basically have to continue to the very end and not just stop where we think, okay, this is what's the regular call now? The sorry, not the referrals are the bonus. No, the referrals are actually part of the regular process. Like, you know, we speak about a sales cycle. How is it a sales cycle if it doesn't generate new pipeline?

Yeah, the over the over specialization, I think has really killed some great. Call it old school tactics that now because we're so specialized, we don't do. We have AES that don't know how to prospect. We have SDRs that don't know how to close. We have AES not asking for referrals because it's not their book of business anymore. We have CS not asking for referrals because they're only compensated on churn or upsell. They're not compensated on new business. Like all that doesn't work well together. And to your point, we actually did. We had that on our closing scorecard, asked for referrals. I was on our closing scorecard as a checklist. Did we ask for referrals? We built out a cadence to follow up 90 days later to check in. How are they doing? Ask for the referral. Like, we built in the systems and processes and then we did every month we pulled up people's pipelines, we pulled up where they were closing and showed them like, look, y', all referrals close at 50%. Why are you cold calling? Like, I'm, you know, I'm a big believer in cold calling and all that, but damn it, if you can do it through referrals, why don't we do that instead? Why are we killing ourselves on cold calls? And so as we get closer to kind of wrapping up here, what else, what else haven't we touched on yet? About Referrals that you think is just an absolute must do if you're trying to build this into your team.

I think what you just mentioned is also a very important point.

Right.

When we speak about referrals, it's not something we do instead of cold calling or instead. Instead of social or instead of emails. They all work well together, very well together. Actually, referrals and social work best together because I got so many leads and introductions from LinkedIn that are not my customers just because I was present. I was helping people and asking for their support in return. And I think that's something we should also think about. And it's now opening it up a bit more again, is we often think about business when we speak about referrals. What we want is actually introductions. And introductions can basically come from anybody who's willing to support us, and we know probably even more people outside of our business world that are willing to support us and help us. And if it's just to get started, that might make us an introduction that might help us, that we can also ask to start this whole thing and to get used to it. I think that's something that's really, really critical.

Yeah. And that. That was where. And people have asked this too, is like, where do you incentivize the. The customer? It's like, I just want the names. I don't incentivize them off closed deals. I don't incentivize them off meetings. Give me the names. The rest of it's my job. The rest of it's my job. Right. Give me the names. You give me five names, and I know that's worth a thousand dollars. Like, I know that's worth a thousand because out of those five, I'm gonna book three. Now, those three, I'm gonna close one to two, $1,000 cost of acquisition on an $18,000 sale. I'll do that all day long. So just. But you. In order to do that, though, you have to have systems in place of, how do you follow up? How do you message, how do you do all of those things? I think that's the key to. It says these referrals are not just instant business. They require numbers just like anything else. You got to generate enough referrals. Right. When I joined Patient Pop, we were doing about 10% of our revenue on a monthly basis from referrals. When I left Patient Pop, we were doing well over 35% of our new business was being generated through the referral channel. And, like, that's just a massive lift across the board. And so I love this man. This is so good. So now, but I got to flip it on you here because, you know, you've listened. You know the name of the podcast, right? The name of the podcast, Live Better sell Better. I have this weird idea, right, that if we had more joy, more energy, more fulfillment, more happiness, that the sales would also improve as we wrap up. What would your live better advice be for people?

Yeah, I think I thought about this before and it's easy to say focus on the things that are good for you, like, focus on your mental well being, your mental health, etc. And execute those things that are good for you. But I think my live better advice is very simple. Basically, it's okay to ask for help. If you don't know, that's fine. If you struggle in business, it's okay to work with a coach and to ask for help. If you struggle with your mental well being, it's okay to speak to a therapist. And generally, if you don't know, it's okay to talk about it to other people. And that will generally is already the first step to. To improvement. I think that's as simple as that.

Simple but powerful, man. Like, I tell people all the time, experience is actually the slowest way to get good at something because you have to make all the mistakes along the way. Whereas if you work with someone who has experience, you can learn so much faster. You can avoid some of those mistakes. Like, I have a coach, I have mentors. Fun, actually. True story. You know, starting my new gig, I've reached out to a few people in my network. I'm like, hey, can I get some time with you? Tell me your rates so I could learn from you a little bit. I think you know these certain areas really well. Two out of the three people I reached out to, it's like, wait, wait, wait, you're coming to me for help? Yeah, I am. I want. I think you have things you could teach me here, and I want to learn from you, right? They're like, oh, my gosh. Like, oh, you know, it's just hilarious, right? Like, we stop learning, we stop asking for help. Whereas the opposite. So, my man, this was phenomenal. This is a type of content that people can go and use tomorrow. Where can people learn more about you, what you're doing, where you put out content? Where can they get more Christoph in their Life?

Basically on LinkedIn. And right now, that's probably the easiest way to get in touch with me. So send me a message, send some feedback. I was always willing to learn and also always willing to get in touch and to speak about things. Also willing to make introductions if I can help anytime, so let me know. Actually said that a couple of times before and nobody ever asked me about it. So let's see what happens after this one.

Well, best believe I will. I'll make those asks right. So love this, my man. Really good stuff. Thank you for the time, the energy, the insights today. Really appreciate you, man. Keep doing what you're doing. All right.

Thank you very much.