Business to Business Referrals & Linkages Program

Overview

The SME Association of Zimbabwe Business to Business (B2B) Referrals and Linkages program is aimed at creating synergistic relationships between businesses in the same sector, with a particular emphasis on SMEs. It is no secret that creating effective business networks will generate far more value for your business than dealing with end customers. Our program enables you to generate additional value for your business by matching you up with other SMEs in your value chain, who can become suppliers, customers or referral partners to your business, depending on how you want to participate. You also earn commissions on referrals that you make of customers to our vendors.

How does the program work?

You can start off by becoming an Affiliate, which means that you are able to refer costomers to members (vendors) listed on our website. When these customers buy from the person you have referred them to, you earn a commission from these sales. In actual fact you will earn commissions from any other purchases that the customer does from other members. So suppose you are running a motor vehicle mechanical repair workshop, and you are working on a customer's car that requires bearings, you can either refer the customer to buy from our website, or you can do the purchase on their behalf. Once the purchase is confirmed, you earn a commission based on how much the vendor is offering. If that customer that you referred then goes on to buy other products or services on our platform, you continue to earn commissions on those purchases too.

This program works best for industries where several players are involved in a process or value chain. So for example if you are in the construction industry as an architect, you will be able to find other members registered with us who are also in that value chain (see this page) such as builders and suppliers of building materials. You can refer customers that come to you for building plans to such members, thereby earning commissions whenever that customer buys additional services from those other members. Similarly if you bake wedding cakes and are able to refer your clients to other service providers for photography, vehicle hire etc, you can also generate commissions off such referrals. You can identify members and their products/services by going to the relevant value chain group indicated at the top of the Online Marketplace page, as indicated here:

Over and above referring customers, you can also get other colleagues to also sign up as Affiliates of our program, to widen the network. When you recommend the program to other colleagues in this manner, you also get rewarded in cash not only for them signing up to the program, but you also earn a percentage of the commission that they earn when they also refer customers to our vendors.

To get practical details and also to become an Affiliate, click here to access the registration information.

Extending the program: Becoming a vendor

Over and above becoming an Affiliate, you can also participate as a vendor on the program.Being a vendor means that you also list your products and services on the Online Marketplace, thereby becoming eligible to get customers referred to you. Your products and services are also marketed to other vendors as well as members of the Association. We have a reciprocal Affiliate Marketing program which also recruits independent sales agents that add a B2C element to the marketing of your products/services.

You can get details on becoming a vendor by clicking here.