The lunch unfolded without much of a sales pitch. But at one opportune moment, Miller simply said, “If anyone you know needs us, I’d really appreciate a referral.”
“It was such a small, quick, under-my-breath request,” she remembers.
And yet, it paid off. A few weeks after the lunch, the client made introductions to several colleagues, including some from a new division that had ample events budgets. “We now have an RFP for $500,000 to $1 million in new revenue,” says Miller, “and it could lead to millions of dollars more over the next couple of years.” That tiny blip in the conversation may turn out to have a huge impact on her company’s bottom line.
Miller’s story illustrates exactly why it’s smart to treat referral business not as a pleasant surprise but rather as a channel—”a powerful, wildly underleveraged channel,” says Scott K. Edinger, a sales growth strategy consultant and author of the 2023 book The Growth Leader. It’s a channel that you should manage as diligently as any other, he argues.
“I think you’d be hard-pressed to find something with a greater ROI than a referral,” Edinger says. “And yet, the most direction you’ll typically get from the executive team or marketing or even sales leadership is, ‘Yeah, by all means, go get referrals.’ How you do that is left to happenstance or hope.”
To bring structure to referrals, Edinger recommends taking 10 percent of your budget and 10 percent of your sellers’ and sales-enablement team’s time, and redirecting it toward working your existing client list for recommendations. Set up specific meetings where the only objective is to ask for a referral—gently.
And Edinger advises taking a highly targeted approach. You’re not looking for just any new leads. Start with the clients you have today who best represent your Platonic ideal of a customer, from deal size and profitability to ease of account services. Ask yourself this simple but game-changing question: Who are your best customers, and what makes them the best? Then, ask those great customers who in their professional networks might resemble them.
“Referrals are basically how we built our business,” says Owen Loft, founder and CEO of Socium Media, a New York City-based marketing agency that manages digital ad campaigns for brands including the fashion labels Vince and Betsey Johnson. “We’ve almost never had to do digital marketing for ourselves, because we usually have such a steady stream coming in.”
When pursuing leads based on referrals, Loft notes, Socium typically competes with only a few other firms to land an account. Clients tend to consider a wider array of vendors when they use other channels—and that translates to fiercer competition, pricing pressure, and a much longer sales cycle from first contact through closing the deal. “It’s so much easier to close business that comes in from a referral, because it’s already a very warm introduction,” Loft says.
Loft’s business took off during the pandemic, when consumers were snapping up all kinds of products through online shopping. Brand marketing teams were racing to keep pace, driving demand for agencies like Socium. And amid a tight hiring market, folks on the client side job-hopped frequently. When the point person at a client company would leave for a new job, “we’d keep the old relationship and then bring on the new one,” Loft says. “And we just started getting this great network of client referrals that way.”
One major early client was such a revolving door of talent, Loft says, that departing staff introduced Socium to more than 30 new accounts. “They just branched off like a tree,” he says. (Memo to Jerome Powell: Loft cites as a 2024 business headwind the lack of worker mobility, meaning his customers are switching jobs less frequently this year and therefore opening fewer doors for new revenue.)
As you look to build your pipeline for 2025, here’s one more reason that referrals might be a good bet. Because they rely on genuine human relationships, referrals are a way to sidestep the glut of AI-enabled sales messaging that’s clogging every prospect’s email and LinkedIn inbox.
“Instead of trying to send 100 AI-generated emails that get five AI-generated emails back,” says Edinger, “spend some time with a proactive focus on the customers who are most likely to be able to recommend you to somebody else—and treat that as a sales process in and of itself.”
In the spirit of referrals, I have some companies I’d like to recommend to you: 359 of them, to be precise. I’m speaking of the third cohort of Inc. Power Partners. This is our definitive ranking of vendors and suppliers that have demonstrated excellence in serving small and midsize customers. As part of the vetting process, our team of editors, researchers, and reporters gathered information on companies’ products and services, assessed their reputations as captured in online comments and forums, and collected customer testimonials to ensure that sales pitches match the experiences of actual clients.
Among Inc.’s Power Partners are giants like Intuit QuickBooks, Slack, and Oracle NetSuite; muscular challenger brands like Xero, Insperity, and HubSpot; and fascinating upstarts like Carrot Fertility, which shapes IVF employee benefits programs, and Virtru, a top cybersecurity adviser.
In every case, we spoke to founders like you who were ready to attest to a vendor’s genuine commitment to a mutually beneficial business partnership. We’re happy to be the conduit for that positive word of mouth—and if there’s a partner you absolutely love that is not listed here, do me a favour: Please, send that referral my way.
