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Rewards and incentives can steer behaviour, and adopting a consistent behaviour of asking for referrals is essential.

There are multiple issues at play behind this question:

1. 1. Salespeople presumably are rewarded for winning deals, so do not need additional incentive to generate referrals: they will be more likely to win them. 

2. However they may need to be rewarded for generating referrals that they hand to their colleagues who are better placed to sell to the referee.

3. Likewise, Account Managers and Customer Success teams will be well placed to ask for referrals but probably won't carry out the new business sales role, instead handing them to colleagues.

4. The rest of your team outside commercial should be encouraged to ask for referrals from their networks, and may need to be incentivised to do so.

So what should you reward:

1. Celebrate success, shout about getting referrals to set an example for the rest of the team and congratulate and thank the asker.

2. I recommend rewarding the act of asking, but this requires deep trust of your team. Many businesses can only reward getting a referral.

I have clients who reward their teams between £nil and £20,000 for each referral they get. How much the incentive should be is another blog topic.

Good luck getting your team to adopt the referral behaviour.