The referral. Good, old-fashioned word of mouth. It can often be much more powerful than leads generated by telesales, social media, or any other source for that matter.
Having happy customers give your product or service the thumbs up and then introduce it to others, is considerably more efficient than generating new leads from scratch. With a referral, you’re already halfway down the sales process!
What is a referral?
A referral is when someone tells another person about the great work you do and the positive impact it has had on them. Ideally this is done directly through word of mouth, but could also be via an online review, a social media post or even an email.
Should you ask for a referral?
Many people feel awkward about asking customers for a referral, worrying they will come across as pushy or desperate.
However, if you’ve provided a truly fantastic service to someone and you have built a positive and trusting relationship, there’s no reason you shouldn’t ask for a referral.
When should you ask for a referral?
It’s commonplace to wait until whatever work you’re doing is complete before asking for a referral, maybe as part of the invoicing process, but actually the perfect time to ask for a referral is whenever you feel the time is right.
Referrals work on the basis of relationship building and trust, so if you reach a point while providing a service that you feel your client is very satisfied, or that you’ve generated a strong rapport with them, then that is probably the right time to ask.
Don’t always wait until the last step in the process to ask, or you might miss your moment!
How to ask for a referral
You need your request to be specific to that person. It’s no good asking “if they know anybody that might be interested.”
Rather, ask: “I know you work with a lot of other small businesses; would any of them be interested in making a saving on their essential services?”
If you’ve really made a difference to the person you’re asking and added value for them, they’re quite likely to agree to refer you on to relevant people within their network.
More great ways to get a referral
1) Make it easy – consider creating a page or form on your website encouraging visitors to recommend your service to a friend who might find it useful.
2) Create two-way relationships – remember that referrals work both ways, so consider offering your customer a referral to someone you know who might need their services. Maybe engage with their business on social media or leave them a positive review online. All of this will keep you front of mind when your customer is talking to others in future.
3) Tell your story – we humans are storytellers by nature. We enjoy hearing and passing on good stories. You can make your business resonate so much more with your customers if there’s a real human story behind it. People are much more likely to remember your business and talk about it to the next person if you’ve given them an interesting story to pass on.
Wow your customers and earn even more word-of-mouth referrals by offering an amazing product range from Clear Business.
There has been widespread media coverage recently about rising energy prices and energy suppliers ceasing to trade.
Why are energy prices rising?
Wholesale prices for natural gas and electricity have risen due to higher global demand, reduced generation due to planned maintenance and lower renewable electricity generation due to low winds.
We understand this can be unsettling, particularly for business owners whose livelihood depends on the use of energy. Gas and electricity are critical components in so many of our customers’ businesses, and they rely on the energy industry to keep that supply flowing.
Your supply is safe with us
We want to reassure all Clear Business customers that there is no reason to be concerned about the security of your energy supply.
Clear Business is part of the Verastar Group, which provides a wide range of services including telecoms, broadband, water, insurance and payment services, as well as energy, to over 160,000 small businesses.
The fact that we offer a wide range of services, coupled with the way we purchase energy on the wholesale market, means we are at lower risk than many other energy providers from current fluctuations within the market.
If you’re in a fixed term contract
If you’re in a fixed-rate energy contract your rates won’t increase during your fixed term, save in the limited circumstances set out in your contract.
If your contract’s due to end soon, you’ll lock in the best rates by remaining in a fixed contract. We’ll contact you before your contract ends to offer you a renewal.
If you’re not in a fixed-term contract
If you’re not currently in a fixed-term contract for your gas or electricity prices, the wholesale prices increases will unfortunately affect you and you could end up paying more than you need to.
You can secure the most competitive rates by entering into a fixed-term contract with Clear Business, while protecting yourself against any further wholesale price increases.
With The Big Telecoms Switch Off looming and the rollout of full fibre broadband already well underway, you’ll need to act if you want your business to stay connected.
By 2025, the traditional copper networks that currently enable our communication services will be switched off and the whole network replaced with new “full fibre” technology, also known as Fibre to the Premises (FTTP).
Now, while it may seem a way off, you should consider 2025 as the absolute final deadline to switch. Modern businesses wishing to reap the many benefits of the new technology are acting right now, and there are very good reasons why.
Here are the top five reasons why upgrading to full fibre right now could be of major benefit to your business:
1. Speed and reliability
The headline benefits of FTTP are the boost it offers in terms of speed and reliability.
If your business uses digital services like video conferencing, social media or any cloud-based software such as those commonly used for accounting, payroll, stock management or file storage, then the last thing you need is a slow or patchy internet connection slowing you and your team down.
And then there are devices such as point of sale equipment and card payment terminals which usually rely on a Wi-Fi connection, so when your broadband connection is slow or if it fails, it’s impacting how quickly you can serve customers, and causing you potential embarrassment and loss of business.
Full fibre broadband is designed for the demands of modern businesses that need to stay connected no matter how many devices connect and can handle large files and bandwidth-hungry applications without breaking a sweat.
Fibre cables are also 70-80% more reliable than copper and, because the connection is direct to your premises, you have your own uncontested bandwidth that is not affected by peak usage periods in your neighbourhood. This means that when the café next door is busy, and patrons are having a coffee whilst browsing the internet on the guest Wi-Fi, it doesn’t have a knock-on effect to your internet connection!
Full fibre delivers the fastest connection on the market, with download speeds of up to 1000Mbps and upload speeds of 150Mbps, though most businesses don’t need these speeds. But even a basic FTTP connection offers speeds of 115Mbps, which is faster than even the fastest standard Fibre to the Cabinet (FTTC) connection, with room to upgrade your connection if your needs change.
Fibre has clear business benefits, and you can get this competitive advantage before you’re forced to switch in the next few years.
2. Beat the queue
Many businesses have already switched to FTTP and are enjoying the benefits.
The technology is now becoming mainstream with 6.5 million UK homes and businesses already able to get full fibre, with the aim of reaching 25 million homes and businesses in 2026. ISPreview reviewed Openreach’s progress and their current installation rate is c.47,000 premises per week, while the expected peak rate is c.75,000 per week.
Even at peak rate, which hasn’t been reached, there will be around 21 million premises connected by early 2025 leaving more than 9 million of the UK’s 30.4 million premises to be connected in a rush before the switch off deadline for copper networks!
Importantly, installation requires a visit from an engineer to get your connected, and there are limited number of engineer appointments each day. This means that the longer you wait to upgrade, the more likely you are to end up in a queue for an engineer appointment.
But you can take control of the situation and minimise disruption by speaking to your service provider now about switching to FTTP and request an engineer appointment at a time that’s more convenient to you.
We recommend taking the opportunity to upgrade now so you can request an appointment at a time which is least disruptive to your business, whilst demand for engineer appointments is steady.
3. Productivity
There’s nothing worse for your business than wasted hours and low productivity, and it’s even more annoying if you’re paying employees to wait for pages to load, emails with large attachments to send, or software updates to install because of a slow or low bandwidth connection.
Imagine if you could reduce or remove that wasted time, and the boost your business would get, in terms of time back, over the next three years and beyond.
If you employ a team of people in your business, their time is your money, so it makes no sense to waste it. Even when you’re running multiple applications across multiple devices, FTTP can take the strain with no loss of performance.
If your business is slowed down by broadband that can’t cope, there’s no point waiting until 2025 to upgrade to fibre, when you can reap the productivity benefits now.
4. Upgrade your phone line and get your landline calls from anywhere
When the copper phone lines are switched off, your phoneline will run via your internet connection using a system called Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) or Cloud Voice. You have to make this switch, either now or at some point in the next three years.
The great news is that you will use Cloud Voice via a device that sits within your premises and looks very similar to your current home phone. Plus, you can also make and take calls from your landline number via a simple app that works across a range of other devices – like your mobile phone, laptop or tablet. This means you’ll always be connected to your customers via your business phone number, wherever you are, and you’ll never again lose out on trade because you missed an important call when you were out and about.
Of course, if you don’t want to hear from customers during your downtime you can always mute calls from the application!
Cloud Voice also offers a host of other benefits over traditional phone lines that you can read about here. And of course, we’ll make sure that you keep your business phone number when you transfer over.
5. Futureproof your business
We’re all using more and more digital services, both in our personal lives and in our businesses. The pandemic only accelerated this trend, with a huge uplift in use of video conferencing, cloud apps, and ecommerce services, predominantly driven by more remote and flexible working.
The beauty of FTTP is that whatever tools or applications you might want to use within your business, connectivity and bandwidth will never be an issue. As our digital world develops, the applications created today are being built with the new high-bandwidth infrastructure in mind, so you might find that the tools you want to use next year or the year after struggle to run efficiently on an older connection.
Prepare your business for tomorrow, today! Get access to the cutting-edge connectivity your business deserves and ensure you’re ready for whatever the future holds.
