Do you charge or expect to pay for referrals?

Hi All,

Many of you know that while I do build and design my own websites, my specialty is writing website content and website sales copy. In my inbox this morning was a note from a web development firm asking if I had any clients who needed website design services or if I paid for referrals if they send any of their clients to me.

It got me to wondering if any of you charge or pay for referrals. I know this is quite common in many industries, but I see it too as providing a complete service to customers. And besides, in my case if a client doesn't have a website, they don't need me in the first place so it's in my best interest to help them get one. Seems like it would be somewhat the same for web designers helping their clients find a writer, database programmer, or specialty graphics designer.

What do you or your company do? Do you pay or collect referral fees? Or do you see such transactions as providing a quality service and ensuring your clients are happy and consider the business gained or retained as payment enough?


Michele

Hello,

I'm mainly a web designer but i've also a content writer and have done a fair amount of PHP and Perl coding. I do work with a few hosting and development and we send each other customers. I don't see that exchange as a referral fee. More like a comission. If you had comercial staff working for you, you would pay them a comission for each project that they come up with. So it's only fair that you invest that same comission with someone that brought to you a new customer.

That's my two cents, of course. And by the way, if you have anyone needing design, I'll be more then welcome to pay you a comission ehehe

Ricardo

We have a Whitelist of other companies we work with that we give to clients if asked, most of the people on that list do similar so while no money changes hand we each pass potential clients.

We use to have an agreement with our old hosting company to send them referrals but when the service degraded we chose to cancel the agreement. Ultimately I think as long as your honest about the fact you are compensated for the referral their would not be a problem but in the long term making strategic partnerships and getting referrals yourself is a lot more profitable.

To be honest, I found the email quite forward and a bit off-putting. After all, they've done no business with me or anyone I know and they're asking for me to trade on my good name to send them my clients (for a fee) and that they'll entrust me(a stranger) with their clients (for a fee).

I give them points for marketing, but it left me wondering why me. If I owned a company with the caliber of clients their site claims to have worked with; I would have hired a writer for a small job to see how they work before I even began talking about referrals. The whole thing just seemed a bit off to me.

So far, my clients have all had existing websites or already had folks in place (several times themselves) building one when they contacted me. It would make sense - why pay for a writer when there's nowhere to put their work?

I've worked with Realtors in the past and referral fees are a huge part of their business, so the concept isn't entirely foreign to me. I guess I'm just a strange bird in that I think the customer having the best possible website or marketing package is the most important thing and if outside help is required for that - it's simply part of getting the job done. There are folks here that I would be quick to recommend to a customer of mine, but the thought of asking anything more than the same consideration in return never occurred to me.

Your not strange as I said our Whitelist only has people we work with/have worked with and could put our hand on our heart and say we would let them do that job for us. On the list for example are two UK legal firms and an events organiser. These are sort of people that we have needed and worked with and when a client asks about some small print in Data Protection law we know we can pass them on, likewise if we are hosting or working with clients for an event we might contact our friendly events team. What's nice about this is that they in turn send us work.

I do not know about the design work referral. I think you usually do not pay for it. But I got some $250 referral for google adsense and I paid half of it.

If you do want to barter in leads, use Salesconx. Go to my blog and click on the ad to read more. They have created a trust system that will help people share leads with people they learn to trust. Pretty cool design if you like this type of thing.

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