I’ve been in business for several years now and have the privilege of working alongside some of the brightest minds in business.These are people who have real experience of doing things that lead to success. I remember one lady Louise Fowler, who I worked with for 2 years and who to my knowledge built 2 £1/5 million businesses, who said “the fortune is in the follow-up” and it took me a while to really grasp what she meant. Follow-up is often talked about as part of the marketing process but in reality it is far more about building relationships and enabling people to trust you.
Follow-up can be broken down into two areas Active and Passive:
Active Follow-up might include:
picking up the phone and calling a prospective customer/client and asking some very un-sales like questions like: “How are you doing”? If they’ve been on holiday ask them how the trip went. If you know that they had a daughter getting married ask how the wedding went. Don’t try to sell them anything – just ask them some open questions. Just find out what they like doing – kite surfing, flower arranging, extreme sports – just find out what they like doing. Continue Reading…
If you’ve ever been in the position of having a happy customer bring or refer a friend or relative to you and your services then you’ll know just how good it feels. Conversely we never find out how many people have a less than satisfactory experience with our businesses and then go on to either tell no one or worse still tell 10 people how poor your service was. In may cases bad customer experiences can break a business – but that’s another story.
Imagine having one customer who goes out and tells one person in the next 12 months how good your service and product are. Now just stop and look at what that would do to your business over the next 12 months – it would have a small effect. What would happen if one in 5 customers did just that – your business would grow by 20%.
Imagine if every customer referred one potential customer a year to you – the business would double in a year. The truth is that many satisfied customers would happily tell others about your wonderful product and service every day.
My Point is this in these days of recession and downturn the companies that will remain and even prosper are those that provide outstanding service and who recognise the value of referrals. So what is your strategy to get referrals?
OK the customer referrals are rather nice and take a while to develop but they alone can save your business. What if you knew the ‘type of person or business’ you’d like to be referred to. What would a customer/client be worth to you? I remember a colleague who received a referral from a carpet cleaner which turned out to be worth £2 Million in the next 12 months. Now that’s the exception but it illustrates the point.
OK lets look at a couple of real examples. If I’m a mortgage broker I might make £2000/mortgage I arrange and i can write 5 every month on average. But the customer is also likely to want the services of other tradesmen so lets have a look at some of them:
insurance for the new home
carpets cleaned
plumber to put in washing machine/dishwasher
electrician – to add in a cooker point
gardener to tame an overgrown garden
a removal company
are the family moving to downsize because children have gone off to university – might be a referral to a pension specilist
builder for some modifications
bank manager because they prefer to bank locally
garage for servicing the car
telephone supplier
The list could go on and on but the initial business was worth £2000 but the spin off referrals could be worth many times that amount. Have you ever noticed that once one house in the road has a new driveway laid the same people then often do the same for other people down the road. The same goes for roofing – one does a good job and gets several referrals from friends and neighbours.
The Mortgage broker (if they are any good) will often have a very close working relationship with solicitors, insurance specialists, estate agents and business that naturally refer people to each other. So the big question is what would your ideal referral be? What would they look like, what sector would they be working in?
Know Exactly What You are Looking For
I’m in business to help people set up their own businesses and very often those people are looking for a change in direction, they are looking to make the best use of their time. The people I’m looking for fit into one of several groups:
Group 1: they have time on their hands and want to start something that they can call their own and looking for a new challenge in life. Most often they are women and they are interested in their own health and that of their family. They may have been in business in some way in the past. They are predominantly in the 50-60 age bracket.
Group 2: they are people who are 25-35 age group and realise that their pension provision is less than what they would like. Not affraid of a little hard work and are teachable and have good sticking power. They quite often have a young family at the early stages of school and have a bit of time on their hands now one or more children are in full time school.
So how do you put that into words to tell people? Let me give you an idea of what I might say or have in the back of my mind.
“I’m looking for people who have taken early retirement or who are nearly at that point and who want to do something gainful with their newly found free time.
They may have children who are getting married very soon and be living away from home.”
If I had a product oriented business I might ask my customers the following question?
“We’ve just introduced a new product which is great for people with ‘tired eyes’
and we are asking all our existing customers if they know anyone who they think might like to try a sample.”
It’s been said that we all have roughly 200 contacts, people we know relatively well, and its those people that we know that are the potential customers that we can refer others too. So if you are part of a group of 10 people who all subscribe to the ‘business by referral’ principle then you have indirect access to 2000 potential customers. One word of warning if you are referring someone to a close or very valuable client then take care if you’ve not used the services of the person you are referring. Say something like “I’ve not used their services personally but they come very highly recommended” or if you are unsure say “I’ve not used their services but I thought you might like to explore if they might be of value”.
Unless you know what you are looking for in terms of referrals then you are in the realms of hoping that you get one or two good ones. Why not learn to be specific and ask people for the choicest referrals?
The seminal work, in my opinion, is this book by Ivan Misner the founder of BNI
