Referrals and 5xing Yourself
Influencers can be a massive accelerator for your growth and pipeline. From thought leaders to content creators, building relationships with individuals on the frontlines of your industry will help you get in front of more eyes while actively contributing to your revenue growth. The partner profile of an influencer is different from that of a ‘fractional BDR’, what I spoke about in the last post, so teams need to think about incentive strategy before getting started with a referral program.
As an upstart in the Web3 space one of the biggest challenges you’ll face in GTM is trust. It’s a new space, things move fast, and buyers are wary. Warm introductions will net you the highest prospect to closed conversion rate, and Influencers are the best way to get more warm intros. However, finding the right set of influencers will make or break this initiative.
To best augment your sales strategy you need to understand the differences between a budding network of GTM leaders and a team you put to work for you to stay lean on sales resources.
You should want your ‘referral partner’ to be actively working on connecting you with new accounts vs. opportunistically plugging you in. You should look out for partners who:
Are in active conversation on social media. Find someone who has an active audience, and/or who gets ‘paid’ for their content.
Would have enough time to make your referral program a top priority on a weekly basis.
Have deep connections in the space, for example by having previous advisory / operations experience or a high count of followers ‘you follow’.
Without getting too deep into partner profile elements, those are three core ideas you should keep top of mind when sourcing for partners. You’ll likely know who’s a good fit and who isn’t by gut.
Beyond identifying the best candidates for the program, aligning on budget relative to your contract values, creating a process, and planning an outbound strategy are all tactical pieces of building a referral program that you should have down to succeed. I’ll talk about each one of these in the next blog posts.
Follow along here and on X if you’re interested in learning more about navigating sales in our increasingly digital world.
