How to Ask for a Referral from a Client

Your customers are your best source of qualified sales leads.
“If your customers aren’t selling for you, you won’t have customers.” Those words of wisdom are from Steve Silver, vice president and research director at Forrester (now Sirius Decisions), when he made his 2025 predictions at the 2019 OpStars Conference. No, I didn’t pay him to promote asking for referrals. He’s just a very smart man.
One of the first things I ever wrote about was enrolling your clients as part of your sales team. How do you do that? You learn how to ask for a referral from a client—and then you ask every single one of them.
Clients aren’t mind-readers. They don’t always know we want more business. (Yep, that’s for real.) And they frequently don’t know who they should refer to us—because we haven’t asked for referrals and described our ideal client.
If you want a pipeline full of qualified sales