The key to referral success is promotion. If you want high levels of advocacy, you need awareness: you need to tell customers that there is a program, and more importantly, you need to ask for the referral. In most programs this means a balanced strategy of on-site, in app, and outbound promotion through email and social. In some, it means enabling individual people, or agents, to promote your program directly.

Extole’s default recommendation for a great program is that you promote where you make contact with the customer and at the point where they feel close to your brand. In most cases this means around the point of purchase, whether the shopping cart or in emails triggered by the purchase.

Agent programs are used when the point of purchase is a salesperson, clerk, associate, design consultant, or another individual that is not your consumer, but is an “agent” of your company and interacts directly with your customer. You are familiar by now with the term Advocate (the person who refers) and Friend (the customer who transacts based on the referral from the advocate). An Agent is the third role - the person who asks customers to become advocates.

Agents, simply put, ask for the referral.

It is easy to confuse an agent with an advocate because they seem to be driving referrals, but they are different. An agent is your salesperson who after closing a deal with a local plumbing company asks: “Are there other contractors you know that might be interested? Perhaps a painting or electrical company that you could refer us to?” The advocate is the plumber. The friend is the painter, but the salesperson is the agent, a catalyst that creates referrals, especially when there is limited use of sites or apps by your end consumer.

An agent program is like a standard referral program with very familiar advocate and friend experiences. The primary difference is in promotion. In an agent program we generate links for each salesperson or design consultant or associate that drive traffic to the program. We call these links agent links, and they work similar to promotion links that you might generate for an email blast.

When we generate the links we associate each with an individual person (whom we call the agent). The links all point to a microsite or a page with a share experience, but they are unique, and allow us to track which agent actually solicited the referral.

For example, Adrian, a design consultant for a flooring group, sells a project to Mary, a homeowner. Adrian asks Mary if any family or friends would be interested in an estimate on flooring for their own projects, and tells her that there is a $100 Amazon gift card for her and a $100 discount for her friend. He offers her a business card with the link refer.flooringpros.com/p/adrian. Mary realizes that Claire, her neighbor, is interested. Mary clicks on Adrian’s link and sends a referral to Claire.

Claire clicks on the referral, and asks for an estimate. She earns a discount on her program and Mary gets an email with her Amazon gift card.

But what about our friend Adrian? Is he left out in the cold?

That is the beauty of Extole’s agent program. Because Mary used Adrian’s link, we can track that the original source of the referral was Adrian. In some cases, we have had clients provide an additional incentive to the agent. In this case, Adrian is assigned the lead for Claire, and gets one more deal applied to his quota.