Would you like to make yourself more referable? Do you currently know your referral quotient?
Many companies pay hundreds of thousands of dollars creating and distributing surveys to find out how their clients think. Less than 5 percent of the surveys are returned, and even less if a reward is not given. But now you have a tool to find out how your clients perceive your relationship and how referable you are. It's called the Net Promoter Score (NPS).
Fred Reichheld, a partner at Bain and Co., spent a decade searching for a simple way to measure why some clients become raving advocates and others are just simply satisfied. Here is how NPS is implemented. First ask your clients to rate you on a scale of zero to 10 on the question:
"How likely is it that you would recommend us to a friend or colleague?" Then sort the responses into three groups:
1) Promoters: 9s and 10s
2) Passives: 7s and 8s
3) Detractors: 0 through 6
The percentage of promoters minus the percentage of detractors equals your score. If you have 75 percent promoters and 15 percent detractors, you have an NPS of 60. This means your "refer-ability" is only 60 percent. As a rule, anything above 50 percent is good. But referrals don't come consistently unless your score is over 75. One important consideration is to offer this survey only to your A and B clients. These are the clients you most want to get referrals from.
Your goal is to constantly drive that score up by asking two important follow-up questions:
