Referral Prospecting

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With the advent of social networks like LinkedIn and Facebook, it has become far easier to understand who someone knows, and thus, could potentially refer you to, than ever before. This can be helpful for prospecting and reduce friction for getting your foot in the door to set an appointment.

Doing this at small scale can be a great way to initially supercharge your pipeline, but it will eventually run out of steam, in that you, your team, your investors, and so on will eventually run dry. So while it can’t be a long term solution necessarily, it can help early on.

Connection Discovery

First, note that referral prospecting is not about selling to anyone who will take a meeting because they know someone in your organization. Rather, it is about using relationships within your organization to more easily access accounts that you know are qualified and have the pain your solution solves. So just be clear on which direction the causality runs here.

That said, there are two ways you do this. One is with contact connections and the other is with account connections. In the first case, you look at the target

How to do this? We’ll discuss a more manual process first, before talking about ways to do this in a more automated, scalable way. First, LinkedIn and Facebook connect with everyone in your organization, your investors, and your advisors. This will make it such that when you look at a prospect’s LinkedIn or Facebook profile, you’ll be able to see if any of your organization’s stakeholders are shared connections.

Once this is done, visit the LinkedIn profile of decision-maker prospects you identified in your prospecting exercises. If you want to just test this out, start with 100 decision-makers, like Directors of Talent or VPs of Sales or CFOs or whatever the decision-maker is for your solution, and see which of your organization’s stakeholders are joint connections. Note which of those stakeholders are potential referrers, as we’ll be using that information later.

Once you’ve done this, reach out to each of those joint connections via email, ask them if they would be open to connecting you with the target in question, specifically noting who you want to get in contact with, why it will be valuable to that target and not a waste of their time, and lastly noting to the potential referrer that if they’re willing to connect you, you’ll send an introduction request email with full context to forward along. If a given shared connection is indicated for more than one target contact, aggregate all the targets to note to them all at once whom it is that you’d like their help engaging with.

The other, more exhaustive, way you can do this is to sit together with each of these stakeholders and together manually go through their LinkedIn networks. This can take an hour or two, but will invariably be worth it. This approach is particularly helpful in that you can be more thorough than the approach above—however, it requires a stakeholder to sit with you, so there may be more friction, but it can be worth it. And while you’re going through their connections, you can look for titles that are attractive, even if it’s not a VP of Talent, which would be your ideal contact, if instead they know a Recruiter or Recruiting Manager at the target company, that can be better than nothing. And, failing that, you can look for senior staff who work at a target company, even if they’re not in the right part of the org.

When I say log these profiles as you’re going, it doesn’t have to be complicated. Just stand up a Google Spreadsheet and while you sit with your referrer, just copy and paste the LinkedIn URLs into cells for you to later prioritize and go through—typically it can be easier just to have them log into LinkedIn on your laptop and you can drive, and all they have to say is, “Yeah, that person’s great” or, “No, I don’t know her well.”

Contact Outreach

After this session is done, go back through the relevant contacts and qualify their orgs to ensure that they’d be a fit for your solution. Again, we don’t want to be introduced to organizations that don’t have the pain we solve—it will be a waste of our time, and theirs. Once you have that list, you’re going to send the referring stakeholder an introduction request email for each of the target contacts. Make it as easy as possible for them to just forward something along with their compliments. We’re not going to rely on them to act or come up with messaging, or anything like that. We want this to be as low friction as possible.

This email should include a subject like “Intro to [target contact’s name]?” and within the email should detail why you want to get introduced to them and how it will be valuable to them. Specifically, you need to characterize why you know their organization is qualified for your solution, and a terse statement of the clear value it would provide and the problems it would solve for their organization—so not dissimilar to the outreach emails above where we characterize the research we’ve done. But in this case, we’re making it easy for our referrer to just hit forward and pass the outreach along, or just cc you into the thread, along with their comments as to why you’re a worthwhile and trustworthy person to connect with. Our goal is simply to use our referrer as a reputation provider—they are validating that we are legit and approving the statements we make in our introduction request email.

When you send the introduction request along, use something like Yesware or other email tracking services to put a tracking pixel into the email. This way you can see if indeed the email was forwarded along, by seeing how many unique IP addresses opened the email.

If your referrer cc’s you into the email thread, be ready to quickly put them to bcc, and send a thoughtful quick request for a call, ideally providing a set of times and dates a week out or so. Or, if the target is a peer of your ultimate target—for example, the Director of Customer Success and you want a referral into the Head of Recruiting—quickly note that, and who that ultimate target person is (you will have sniffed that out ahead of time and potentially could have noted that in your intro request). But speed is of the essence, in that you want to look like you’re on top of things.

If you don’t hear back from the target of your intro request, all is not lost. I typically recommend that you go directly to the target contact, using the same email thread, and take another shot at convincing them you’re worth taking a call with. Use the same email thread because it will have the reputation value of your referrer being willing to introduce you. But after that point, good to move on to another contact.

Typically it’s a nice touch to hook up your referrer with a gift card for taking the time to go through all of her contacts with you. And then if you end up closing a deal based on her referral, well, maybe add another gift card on top of the original!

The above is a more manual way of going about this. If you want to make it more scalable, you can use software like Teamable to consolidate all the contacts of your staff, advisor, investors, and so forth into a unified database that you can query for titles and company names, which will reduce friction in the email outreach part of this process. Given that these referral deals can move very quickly if properly executed, the return on investment on dedicated software to facilitate it can be very compelling.