The warmest kind of referral happens when a client contact you already have a relationship with recommends that you reach out to a specific colleague in their company because they believe that person could benefit from what you offer. This referral usually comes after you’ve shared a broader insight that is unrelated to the initial task or project. The existing contact acts as a catalyst, recognizing that the insights you shared align better with a colleague’s responsibilities.

This scenario provides a clear and leveraged path for entry: you can use this connection by saying, “Hey, so-and-so, I was talking to your colleague about something unrelated, and they recommended I reach out to you.”

But how do you, as a marketer, encourage this kind of internal cross-pollination without waiting for it to happen accidentally?

Marketer’s Strategic Mandate: The Client “Show and Tell”

The most effective way to initiate internal peer recommendations is to set up structured, regular “Show and Tell” sessions with your existing clients.

As a marketer, your job is to frame these sessions as a genuine value-add that you deliver to all your clients, positioning them as a structured approach to communication. You might even give these sessions a proprietary name, such as a “North Star Review,” which removes the perception of them being self-serving sales pitches.

These Show and Tell sessions should happen at least once a year, or perhaps once a quarter, and they must have a broader conversation than just the current project or task at hand. The objective is to deepen the relationship and potentially create new opportunities within the organization by talking about all the ways you can help.

Delivering Objective Value with Your Marketing Content Strategy

To succeed, your Show and Tell cannot be a sales pitch, a cross-sell or an upsell effort. It must be objective.

As a supplier working broadly across the marketplace, you hold a unique benefit: you have more data points and insights compared to your customer, who operates within the proverbial four walls of their organization. Your materials should leverage this perspective.

Marketing must create assets that support sales in communicating these broad insights:

1. Focus on Industry Insights and Lessons Learned: The session should cover best practices, tips, what’s working, and what’s not working in the marketplace. The content should be based on your experience solving similar problems for other companies.
2. Strategic and Focused Content: The session should not just be five things you think are interesting. It should be five things you know the customer finds interesting and that might help you win more business or displace a competitor.
3. Maintain Objectivity and Confidentiality: When discussing competitors, keep focus on the challenges, issues, processes and problems, not on naming specific companies you work with. Sharing generalized lessons learned across your portfolio avoids confidentiality conflicts.
4. Create Shareable Assets: While a structured conversation framework (often through slides or a PowerPoint presentation) is essential, you should also develop physical materials, video clips or interactive 3D models that support the presentation. Crucially, the assets should make it really easy for the client to share the information internally with colleagues.

Hot leads from warm referrals

By creating and positioning this structured, objective communication approach, you are increasing the likelihood that your satisfied contact will naturally say, “Oh, so-and-so could probably benefit from this.” This leverages the core fact that customers rely on peer recommendations, providing the warmest referral you can secure.

RH Blake specializes in helping B2B manufacturers move beyond general cross-selling to strategically instigate the warmest kind of referral—the internal peer recommendation. We support your marketing efforts by establishing the framework for regular, structured Show and Tell sessions with existing clients, and developing the necessary objective, strategic assets (including presentation slides, video clips and interactive 3D models) that make it easy for satisfied client contacts to disseminate high-value industry insights and lessons learned to their colleagues, ultimately capitalizing on the proven reliance customers place on internal peer recommendations. If this sounds like something you need, let’s talk.