Customer referrals amount to one of the most vital sales leads for any companies.  Customer referrals are the most cost-effective way of growing one’s business because it does not require expensive media advertisement and almost cost free. If your organisation can reach the ultra-high level of referrals, you have saved tonnes of advertising money for leads.

Customers who are happy with a business service will refer it to another customer to the said business. Thus the business would have already established a good amount of advance selling. Referred clients tend to trust your business more and tend to purchase more and also have lesser buyer regret or cancellation of services.

How to get Referrals?

1. Offer your clients referral fees or rewards. If the referral fees are rewarding and it’s not difficult to close each customer, you be surprised to find many of your clients are willing to refer you their friends. The biggest difficulty that businesses encounter in getting referrals is getting their marketing or sales persons to consistently ask for referrals. Remember that if you don’t consistently ask for referrals, you will not get enough of them.

2. Make sure you provide excellent service or products. This is one of the keys to be successful in getting referrals. The basic rule of the thumb is that you must provide good services in order for the customer to trust you with your friends. Customers are worried to lose their friendship because of your poor service thus they will take your quality of service very seriously in considering referring their friends to you.

3. Get customers testimonials and they will be open to referrals as they praise your services. You do not need a PhD to know that the best excuse you can use to ask for a referral is to ask for positive testimonials. Once your clients give you good testimonials they will also feel comfortable to give you referrals.


Why Customer Referrals Are Better?
Every business knows that customer referrals are way better at garnering revenue than any other methods. The reasons why customer referrals are better are as follows:

1.      Transferring Trust: The pioneer step related to buying process, is for the buyer to trust the business seller. It is a very difficult thing to establish the trust with an unfavourable lead. A referral lead is way better because the service was referred to them by trustworthy people. Therefore, this trust is transferred from the referral source to a said business.

2.   Shorter Sales Cycle: Transferred trust shortens the sales cycle for a referral lead when compared to an unfavourable lead.

3.      Lesser Price Sensitivity: The client referrals are less sensitive about price. This happens because of reduced risk in the minds of the referrals. Thus, they can focus more on the product or service value than on price.
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4.     Customised Offering: One can be more effective while presenting a product or service to a referred prospect. This is because one will generally have more background knowledge about them from the referrer.

​Referred leads are the easiest to convert to sales. They are the most cost effective leads too. Build your referrals and you will save tonnes of advertisement monies and you will have less resistance when closing the sales.

​Globalisation is the process of global integration which arises from the exchange of world views, ideas, products, trade and etc. Globalisation started in the 1980s and has spread worldwide because of technological advancement in the areas namely, transport and communication.

It was fuelled by the need of developed and developing nations. The developed nations’ multi-corporations (MNCs) has the need to maintain price competitiveness. But their home countries are developed and they faced high labour cost. Consumers always demand for cheaper and better goods.

In order to continually supply affordable and competitive priced goods, the MNCs need to find a way to lower their labour cost to fight other competing MNCs. Thus, globalisation became a platform for the developed nations’ MNCs to shift their productions to developing nations. The developing nations need foreign direct investment and creation of businesses and jobs for their poor populations and so they open their doors to foreign MNCs and welcome them in to create jobs and exploit their cheap labour. This became a win-win situation.

Effects of Globalisation on Asian Economies

Middle Class Creation
Asia benefited the most out of globalisation. The MNCs came into Asia, they build factories, created massive jobs and by 2010, these MNCs had help Asia created a huge pool of middle class ready to consume even more products than their European neighbours. This cannot happen without the foreign direct investments of the global companies.

Technological Advancement
The MNCs brought in new technologies into many countries. They advised many Asian governments on technology and infrastructure in order to support their manufacturing productions. This brought about a huge technological advancement in many Asian countries. India is the best example, they became the world best information technology outsourcing centre for the world.
 
 Infrastructure Advancement
China was much undeveloped even in the early 1980s. But when Deng Xiaoping opens up china to foreign direct investment, the world witnessed the rapid infrastructure advancement of China. Tonnes of foreign Direct Investment were brought into China. Infrastructures were built to support the MNCs. High tech parks, industrial parks and science parks were built to help support the MNCs’ globalisation plans to tap into China cheap labour. The world witness how the MNCs made China into the world’s manufacturer. The middle class of China was created, with higher salaries they demanded better housing and amenities. Thus, China infrastructures grew leaps and bounds.

Economy
We have to admit that the western world had contributed much to Asia’s rise. Without these MNCs flooding into China and Asia to provide jobs and build the economy of Asia, we will not have arrive to today’s news that China had become the world’s No. 2 economy and India is on the way to be top in the next 30 years’ time.

Globalisation Controversies

Yet the subject of globalisation is without controversies. Much oppositions in politics view that the quest of MNCs shifting jobs to cheaper countries and then importing back these cheap goods to sell to their locals without tariffs is causing massive unemployment to their developed countries. Many political oppositions attempt to stop MNCs from shifting to cheaper countries as this would mean massive jobs losses to the local and it would be unfair to ask the affected unemployed locals to buy these goods that were indirectly responsible for their job losses.

Conclusion
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Globalisation had indeed build Asia’s economy, the huge pool of middle class, infrastructures and technological advancement. Many argued that globalisation benefits Asian economy more than the developed nations. However, this is not necessarily true in the long term because in the long run as Asia’s middle class keep growing, the Asians will start to buy from these developed nations in larger quantities then they would ever expect. In fact, we are already witnessing wealthy Chinese queuing up in luxury stores all over Europe.

​The June of 2016 saw much uproar regarding the Great Britain’s decision of leaving the European Union. The term Brexit was coined by combining two words, Britain and exit. While the situation was tricky for all the European countries, the Brexit will also have some repercussions on the Asian economy. (OK)
The impacts of the Brexit were very immediate as the pound fell more than 10% when the Asian trades are concerned. On the other hand, Japanese Yen has glided against the expectations of the policy makers of Japan. The markets that were emerging have witnessed a fall in their currency values because the investors have pulled out their money from risky assets.

When it comes to the economy of Britain, there are more than a few challenges that the country needs to tackle. First of all, UK has to negotiate its economic status with the remaining European Union (EU). Trade deals with the EU will have to be renegotiated. But this is not the case, as the EU is more likely to implement trade tariffs to serve as a deterrence against future EU members from leaving the EU.

One major change happening across the global economy is that investment money is moving from riskier assets to the safer ones. This, in turn, has a direct impact on the Asian stock markets.

As far as the Asian markets are concerned, the policy makers from India, Japan and Korea aren’t revealing much about the situation’s impact on their countries’ economies. All the policy makers from the aforementioned countries are trying to keep the investors calm and market stable.

However, it's also true that it is unlikely that the Brexit will have a long- term impact on Asia’s economy. When it comes to the percentage of exports to the United Kingdom, the figures are somewhere around 2-3% for Asian countries like Vietnam and Hong Kong. The percentage is even lower for economies like Malaysia and Indonesia which is around 0.2-1%. With low trade correlations, it is unlikely the Brexit will have a significant impact on Asia economy.
 
India and Japan Had Concerns over Brexit

However, the big Asian economies like Japan and India may have some impact from the Brexit. Japan Inc. has approximately 140,000 employees in the UK alone while the UK investments total at $59 bn. The large scale Japanese car producers and manufacturers including Toyota are already of the opinion that the leave vote might lead to 10% duties on the UK made cars that are sold in the European Union.

At present, Toyota exports around 90% of the cars it manufactures in the United Kingdom and three-quarters of the aforementioned percentage goes to the EU. All the Asian companies that have set up their operation base in the UK for gaining easy access to the European Union countries need to have a reassessment done.

Hitachi, the Japanese electronics firm, for instance, was quoted saying that it would rethink about its post-Brexit UK operations. India’s IT exports to Europe and the UK which is worth almost $30bn and it accounts for a quarter of India’s IT exports.
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The Tata Group which is among India’s most eminent business houses also talked to the media about the Brexit. Tata has its business in the UK ever since 1907. Tata spokesperson said that the business house presently has 19 independent Tata companies in the United Kingdom where they deal in diverse businesses. They also added that the market access, as well as access to a skilled workforce, will be their main considerations.
Finally, Asian policy makers are surely keeping an eye on the process of how UK decides to separate itself from EU. If there are some serious repercussions of the Brexit from EU, then it would be foolish to believe that the Asian economies would be unaffected. In conclusion, the Brexit is sure to change the global economy climate in various ways.