In almost every industry, referrals are the gold standard of customer acquisition. Research has repeatedly shown that referred leads close faster, buy more, and stay longer — all with significantly less effort and at a much lower CPA than non-referred prospects. A University of Pennsylvania study[1] found that referred customers are more loyal and profitable — by a 16% margin — than their non-referred counterparts.

Great product, winning team and strong revenue growth. Your B2B company is crushing it, so you don’t need a referral strategy, right? Wrong.

During my time with Ambassador, I’ve had the fortune of working with a number of incredible B2B brands to build out their referral programs. HP and SAP are two of the most notable examples, but there have been several others.

If you’ve done any research on successful referral marketing use cases, you’ve probably run into a lot of the same examples over and over again.

Close your eyes. No really, close your eyes and let your fingers dance across your keyboard. Open your eyes. Now, break up the jumble of text with a few haphazard bullets, lists, and stats. Then, log in to your dashboard and publish your improvised masterpiece on your company blog. You can blast the email list while you’re at it too. Before you hit send, make sure that there are a few words underlined in blue to give your helpless clients an escape route to the nearest website. Congratulations, ...

Editor's note: This is an excerpt from our most recent eBook, "The Executive's No-Nonsense Guide to Referral Marketing." To read the full eBook, click here.  If you polled a group of marketing leaders and asked them to name their favorite type of lead, one response would stand out: Referrals.

If there’s one question we hear more than any other from customers looking to start or scale a B2B referral program, it’s this: Do B2B referral programs actually work?