Is it good manners to ask for referrals?

I hesitated a little before deciding to send out a special email this morning to nominees and voters in the Best Construction Blog Competition. The goal:  To see if participants can recommend colleagues, suppliers, clients (or their own business) for a full-scale advertising-supported feature in The Design and Construction Report.

Why the hesitation?  My response is the natural human discomfort in switching from sharing to “selling”, from giving freely to making a request.  Most of us are uncomfortable with this process, partly because we fear rejection, and partly because (deep in our hearts) we want business to come our way seemingly effortlessly, through client referrals, inbound inquiries, and the like.

These fears have some validity.  Nothing is more irritating than to be hounded by an incompetent high-pressure sales representative, and efforts to  sell without the rejection — taking a direct no — head us down the path of expensive and often ineffective advertising, spam, or other strategies where we hope to get people to call us without us having to initiate direct communication and feel the pain of the “no”.

Effective marketing, of course, is all about encouraging the “yes”, either to cause the wonderful inbound inquiry, or to make it much easier for the sales representative to do business because the potential client has developed a positive perception of your business or practice.  When we get it 100 per cent right, it doesn’t even feel like marketing or sales; the relationships are so strong and natural, that you are truly friends, colleagues and advocates of your business associates or partners.

So will this email initiative be effective?  I’ll let you know the initial results  tomorrow and follow up with updates next week, and upon publication of the next issue of Design and Construction Report.  I’ll measure results by:  The number of requests to be removed from the list (a rather clear no), leads from suppliers and clients, and of course, ultimately, the dollar value of the sales achieved from the initiative