Get More Leads with an Employee Lead Referral Program

without adding any new marketing initiatives, without adding any sales headcount, without having to hire an agency, just with one simple form on your website and a quick meeting with your team. Is that worth it? We got about 10 leads in the first month of rolling this program out at Guru. And so now I'm going to share with you exactly what we did to get more fresh, hot leads to help us to sell more new business and add to the top line. Welcome back to another episode of Payrollin'. My name is Matt Vadie, and on this episode I'm going to break down a wonderful technique we learned from Sonia Ahola at Ahola Payroll. Shout out, Sonia, you're the best. Uh, we talked about this not only on a previous episode a while back, but we talked about at the IPPA Spring Summit as well. That is a simple employee referral program for your client success team. So what is this? Well, it's simply asking your client success team to go ahead and ask the question when they hear a buying signal from one of your existing clients. So for example, maybe a payroll specialist is on the phone with one of your current clients. She hears that they're using Excel or maybe paper time cards to track time. Says, hey, would you like to have a conversation with one of our sales team members about how you can automate your timekeeping? It's really easy and it's not that And then boom, she's got permission to make that intro to a sales team member. That lead gets submitted. We send her a $10 gift card for submitting the lead. We send her a $100 gift card if the deal closes, and then we're able to upsell more business. She's able to make a little bit of extra money, and we're able to keep the client happier longer because we're providing a more comprehensive solution. It is a win-win-win, y'all. All right, so let's talk about the specifics of it. I pretty well laid it out right there. All we're doing is asking, hey, anytime you hear that buying signal, anytime you hear anything where there's a good potential opportunity for them to investigate more of our solutions, then simply ask them for permission to have somebody reach out for a conversation. In our world, the opportunities are fairly limited in that we don't do a lot of upselling. We bundle everything pretty tight, but we do have folks that maybe they need to add timekeeping. Maybe they're interested in adding benefits and they'd be a good fit for the PEO. Maybe they're using us for payroll and they'd be a great opportunity to talk to somebody about our ASO model. And so in our world, these upsells are pretty substantial when we can do it. And we've done a fantastic job. Like I said, there's— in the first month, we had one teammate really embrace this, submit nearly 10 leads on her own, and 2 of those turned into upsells for PEO and our ASO model. So tremendous return on it already. Like I said, she's getting a couple hundred extra bucks that she wasn't accounting for before. And it's a win-win all around. And what we've done is we put a simple form on our website. And if you search Guru employee referral program, it will be number one thing that pops up. You can steal this right off our website and go ahead and model it at your company. We have no pride of ownership here. And again, thank you to Sonya for educating us on this and sharing the link to her page. You'll notice mine's just about a direct knockoff of her page. And so, she's got, you know, you may want to search out there as a whole because they have a lot more upsell opportunities. So for example, if you're like an iSolved licensee and you guys like to segment out and upsell for every little thing that's available to you, might be a good opportunity. You know, if you're upselling applicant tracking, Ben Admin, custom report writing. Again, we don't do a ton of upsells here, so ours are a little bit limited in the things that we upsell, but still tremendous upside for us. So basically, we let the team know, hey, Here's where this form is, make sure you bookmark it. Anytime you're having a conversation, you submit the form, it's going to submit a new opportunity in the CRM, which is gonna be tagged to this person. Then we can run a report at month end and know who we owe gift cards to and then highlight that to the team. That's probably the biggest thing I took away from Ms. Sonya's explanation of this and why they've been so successful and they have. She shared that it's their number one lead source now and they have a pretty substantial sales team. It is, they're driving a ton of top-line growth and they have employees earning thousands of extra dollars per year from the referrals they are submitting. So again, it's a win across the board for everybody involved. And, you know, in their world, they've got a lot more potential upsell opportunities than us, which is totally fine. And so the other thing is some of you may offer other services beyond payroll and HR services. I know we've got a lot of CPAs that listen. That do things there. So really get expansive. And as I'm talking about this, I should be putting our marketing services from Underdog Digital in here. Maybe they hear some buying signals for something like that as well. Um, so keys to success in rolling this program out is a consistency. Make sure you're getting people paid, make sure you're getting them paid on time, and make sure you're highlighting it when you do. So do it during a monthly team meeting or during a weekly team meeting. Make sure that you're highlighting the fact that somebody, um, really knocked it out of the park and was able to earn some extra money consistently training people on what to listen for. What are some things? And again, this is something that the individuals who are really embracing it can share with the rest of the team. And so I plan on asking our teammate Kelsey, who's an amazing rock star, we're so blessed to have her on the team, uh, to share with the rest of the team how she was able to generate such, uh, immediate and awesome traction with the program. And then that gives her an opportunity to continue to shine as an internal teammate in addition to what she's already done to help us to be successful. And so consistent communication, making sure the program is clear, easy to follow, and making sure people get rewarded for it. And then you're going to win. Your company is going to add to its top line. You're going to add to your client retention because we know when we expand that relationship, it makes it harder to unplug the relationship and we create more value for the client. You're going to have teammates that have the opportunity to earn more money. Your sales team is going to get more leads without having to go out and do prospecting. This thing's a home run. Thank you to Sonia. Huge shout out for sharing this with everybody and for being so open, like so many of you are, with your playbooks. And speaking of that, if you're not in the Payroll Innovation Network on Facebook, make sure you join that group. If you just search Payroll Innovation Network in groups, hit request to join. I'll go ahead and approve that. We've got over 100, uh, payroll bureau owners and leaders in there sharing best practices, asking questions, helping one another. I love this industry because everybody's so willing to help each other, and thank you for that. Thank you all for being an open book, and thank you again for listening to another episode of Payroll. And please make sure to rate us 5 stars on your player of choice. We appreciate you. Have a wonderful day.