How To Generate Referrals For Your Home Based Business: Offline

Every business owner knows that if you want your business to thrive long-term, you need a consistent flow of new business coming in. It's true that you can go back and resell to your existing clients, but you NEED to bring in new business consistently.

There are many methods to generating new prospects for your home based business. The quality of the prospect has a lot to do with the method you used to generate that prospect. If you're cold calling, for example, you're going to have a very difficult time finding highly qualified prospects.

Direct response marketing is one of the best ways I've found to generate high quality prospects, but more often times than not, it costs money to generate leads this way. So the best way that I know of - that's free - has been by asking for referrals from your current clients. You can use this method both online & offline, but today I just want to talk about how to do it offline.

So if you're in any kind of direct sales, MLM, or service oriented business... pay close attention.

The first thing you should understand is that if you want your clients to give you quality referrals, you need to provide EXCELLENT service to them first. They need to be blown away by your professionalism, knowledge base, problem solving skills, and of course, delivery. If you can "Wow" your current client base, then you should have no problem getting referrals from them.

Here's how I approach the situation:

I don't ask for the referral until my current business with my client has been closed. So if I'm trying to sell them a lawn mower - for example - I don't mention anything about referrals until they have actually taken delivery of the lawn-mower, have used it, and are happy with it. Once I know that they are satisfied with the product, I go over to their house and pay them a quick visit.

(I ALWAYS take a bucket of chicken, or chinese food, or something for them to eat when I make this visit... I'll tell you why in a second)

Once I'm at their house, I ask them how they like the product... and the grand majority of the time, they're very satisfied. Then I hand them the bucket of chicken - or whatever food I brought - and I say the following line:

"Mr. & Mrs. Client, I bring this bucket of chicken to you as a 'Thank You' for allowing me to feed my family. Your business is greatly appreciated and I want you to know that."

Once they've picked their jaws off the floor, they say "You're Welcome" and this is what I follow with:

"Being that you're so happy with the product that you've purchased from me, I was wondering if you knew of anyone else who could benefit from using my services. It would really help out my business because I generate the most of my sales through referrals from satisfied clients like yourselves."

Now at this point you could do one of two things:

1 - Hand them a bunch of your credit cards and ask them to give it to QUALIFIED referrals so they can contact you. (If you're going to use this method, you MUST follow up with your clients every week and ask them if they've passed on your cards to anyone and that "you're waiting" for their referral)

2 - Get out your pen & pad, and get the names & numbers of the people that they were going to refer to you. To make this easier - as many people blank out when you ask for referrals - mention some of the common problems that your ideal prospect would have so that they can get reminded of names for you.

Referrals are extremely important to ANY business model. Doesn't matter if you're operating a home based business out of your garage or you're an established company with dozens of locations... you NEED referrals to continue the growth of your business.

What I just shared with you is how you can generate referrals for an offline business - like service based or MLM. Soon I will be writing another article for how you can generate referrals for online businesses. (One of my all time favorite methods of generating referrals)

To get updated on when the article will be available, get on my mailing list @ http://MoneyMakingGamePlan.com/blog. I keep my list members posted daily on new updates & new content so you'll be up to date on everything that's happening in the home based business industry.

Arman Vakili