by Annie Johnson

Would you like to increase the number and quality of referrals you get? Building relationships is the key. It starts with your relationship with your advocates and continues through building a relationship with referred customers.

It’s like a courtship. You ask your friends to introduce you to single people they know because you know your friends know you and who might be compatible with you. They tell the other person about you and you about the other person. You may talk on the phone or via email to begin the process of getting to know each other. You arrange to meet, hopefully with your mutual friend there, too.

At this point, do you ask them to marry you?

Typically in referrals, that’s exactly what people do! That’s the point where most people ask for the sale. Although it takes more time to build a relationship first, it is more effective and productive in the long run.

Courting Referrals

#1 Train Your Advocate.
As in dating, you ask people who already know you and have done business with you to become your advocate and refer others to you. It might not occur to them.

Take them out for coffee or lunch and explain what you’d like them to do for you. Start with appreciating what a good customer/associate they are. Then ask if they would be willing to be your advocate. Tell them what you would like them to do:

· Be aware when someone else mentions a need for your kind of product or service. (Some people are good at this, but many need to be “trained” to watch for and respond to expressed needs. Talking about his may help you both to cross-refer.)

· Suggest that person might like to meet you and give the reasons why. (Explain what part of your business lends itself to referrals and what kind of customers could use your product or service.)

· Give that person your contact information and ask if you can contact them and how. (You want that person to have your contact information, but don’t rely on them to call you. Have the advocate find out the best way for you to contact them—and assure them that you won’t give them a hard sell.)

· Tell you about the referral as soon as possible. (Encourage your advocate to get back to you immediately. The other person has a need and will probably act on finding a solution. The sooner you know about it, the more likely you will be considered.)

· Set up a time when all three parties can get together, at least by phone. (This is like the blind date. It always goes better if the mutual acquaintance is there when you meet.)

Explain what you will do when he or she contacts you about a referral, which is to act promptly to arrange to meet with the referred customer.

#2 Begin Building a New Relationship.
Make it easy for your advocate to help you get in touch with the person referred. Take the lead in planning how you’re going to do that.

Learn all you can about the situation in which the advocate and potential customer talked about you. What is the specific need the referred person expressed that made the advocate think of you? What’s the timing? How would that person like to be contacted? Ask the advocate to introduce you.

When you meet, be interested in the other person. Refer to the conversation with your advocate only as a way of establishing a mutual connection. Look for other connections like a Chamber of Commerce, a sport or music, or a philanthropic organization, whatever might generate a conversation that helps you get to know more about each other.

Ask about their business. Be interested in what you can do for them. Remember you’re in the courting phase. If you can establish a connection, arrange to talk later—possibly about how you can meet the need expressed to the advocate. Ask how they would like this to happen.

Follow up on all your commitments. Send a thank you note or email.

#3 Thank Your Advocate.
Have you ever referred someone to a colleague and then wondered what happened? Don’t let your advocates hang out like that. Tell them how the referral turned out and thank them for giving it to you. Make this a good experience for your advocates and they will be more likely to continue recommending you.

-Thanks to Dan Wilkewitz of RealPro Real Estate & Mortgage 970.231.3714 for the concept of thinking of the referral process as similar to courting.
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Annie Johnson, owner of AA Limos, has built the company on a reputation for !st Class* Customer Service. *!st Class = astonishingly high quality. Show your out of town visitors how important they are – have a limousine pick them up. Call 970-587-9299 or 866-587-9299 (toll free) for reservations.

by Candice Bennett

How well do you know your customer? Do you know who they are? Do you know what motivates them? Do you know how they make decisions? Do you understand why they choose your company over the competition? Do you know why they come back to you over time or why they don’t? Do you know why potential customers choose your competitors instead of your company? Segmentation studies and customer satisfaction tracking studies are two types of studies that might help your company better understand its customer.

Segmentation Studies

Segmentation studies are large quantitative studies conducted either over the telephone or online. These type of surveys generally have sample sizes of at least 600 respondents, and sometimes as many as 5,000. The main purpose of these surveys is to ask respondents a battery of demographic, behavioral and attitudinal questions.

Demographic questions can include questions such as gender, age, geographic area, education, income and marital status.

Behavioral questions can be quite varied. Respondents can be asked about how frequently they use a service or product. They can be asked how they use a product or service. They can be asked where they get information about certain types of products or services (for example, are they getting their information from magazines, the Internet, television or word of mouth). They can be asked about how much they usually spend on certain types of products or services, or how much they expect to spend. These questions can run the gamut but will help the researcher better place a value on a particular consumer when it comes to deciding on which potential customers should be targeted and which ones should not.

Attitudinal questions tend to be a battery of statements where respondents are asked whether or not they agree. These inquiries can help understand customer motivations. For example, it might be important for a packaged goods company to know if their likely purchaser cares about protecting the environment. It might be important for a restaurant chain to know if their customer lets their children decide where they eat.

With this wealth of data collected from a segmentation survey, statisticians can then use a variety of tools at their disposal to develop different types of customer segmentations. Why is this useful? It can help companies determine which segments of customers and potential customers have the most value for their business—either because they are likely to spend the most money, use the product or service most frequently, or are most likely to influence others to use the product or service. Prioritizing the customer base can then help companies decide how to spend their marketing dollars most effectively. For example, if a company sells pink hand tools, like screwdrivers and hammers, that are also smaller in size and designed to fit a woman’s hand, maybe the company should choose publications that women read and keep, rather than in men’s do-it-yourself magazines.

Customer Satisfaction Tracking Studies

Customer satisfaction tracking studies are also important for just about any company. Tracking studies are surveys that use the same questions and the same methodology over a period of time. The objective is to quantify a variety of measures against an initial benchmark so that a company can make certain that decisions they are making about their product and service offerings are keeping their customers satisfied.

It’s important when conducting tracking studies to keep the survey itself consistent. Key measures being tracked should be asked the exact same way every time. Also, it’s very important to make sure that the same type of people takes the survey over time. For example, a packaged goods company that wants to measure satisfaction for its floor cleaner should not conduct a tracking study where they talk to only women in March who clean their house once a week and then talk to both men and women in November who clean their house only once every two months. These are different groups of people and their responses from March to November most likely will be different, simply because the population surveyed is very different, rather than because opinion about the cleaning product has changed in six months. Just like any type of scientific method, you want to try and control for as many variables as possible in order to determine what is really impacting change, if even there is any.

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Candice Bennett is the owner of Candice Bennett & Associates. Visit www.candicebennett.com to learn more.

By Jeff Levin

Have you ever experienced the power of a cooperative marketing opportunity? If you haven’t, you will decide to make this a major part of your marketing mix by the end of this article, … if you’re interested in long term success in business!

Cooperative Marketing is when…

A Bank offer’s a live Golf Swing Analysis to it’s customers from a local golf instruction school in their lobby.
A CPA arranges a series of FREE Business Workshops from a local Business Coach for their clients.
A Wedding Photographer gives their wonderful clients a FREE wedding shower cake from a local cake designer.

These are just some of the many different methods of arranging one of the easiest and most effective ways of growing a referral based business. Why is that so?

Well if you’ve ever analyzed any of the fastest growing business models that have ever existed, you will always notice that the creator has established a product, service or business opportunity where everybody wins.

As can be seen in the examples above, the Bank, CPA, and Wedding Photographer win, because they now have a way to continue to add value to their client relations that doesn’t cost them anything. The company presenting the business opportunity (Golf Instructor, Business Coach, Cake Designer) wins because it now has an extremely warm & targeted opportunity to be in front of the host company’s clients, and the client (now a prospect of yours) wins by receiving a gift & an opportunity to add value to their business or their lives!

Imagine if you had 3 other businesses that were excited to promote your business to the very clients you spend most of your time & money trying to reach - cold! How would your business look? Excellent. The secret to making this happen for you is written in bold above…

To make this situation really work - it has to be a Win. Win. Win Scenario!

Your alliance must win. Their clients must win. For you to win.

Cooperative Marketing really levels the playing field for small business to compete right along side large companies. Large companies spend a great deal of their own money promoting their business, because then can! If you are like most small businesses, you lack that capital, but what you do not lack is the human capital, the relationships that, if used correctly, can deliver far better results in the communities you have a vested interest in, than your corporate counterparts.

So let’s really bring the power of cooperative marketing into perspective….

Think about how you go above and beyond the call of duty for your clients. Now, think about how your current alliances do the very same to service their clients. So, what if you purposely arranged opportunities with the other high quality businesses in your area to promote each other in a way that your clients can appreciate & interpret it as additional value being invested in the relationship that you’ve worked hard to establish? Teaming up with one business is great! Teaming up with 20 is better! Using a great cooperative marketing strategy can deliver an equivalent effect to distributing 20,000 bulk mailers in your area, with far better results.

The most difficult part of taking advantage of this extremely effective strategy is finding companies that will allow you to have access to their database.

To do this easily, visit http://www.growthpod.com/ and get started by teaming up with your current referral partners.

There are Traditional methods of cooperative marketing available too.

Follow these steps to work towards landing a successful cooperative marketing opportunity:

1. Choose a business you wish to “cross market” to their database.

2. Explain to the business that you would like to give them something to give, with no obligation to their clients as a sign of customer appreciation.

3. If they choose to move forward, it is critical to take as much work out of the process as possible for the host company. Your offer must go out from the host company on their letterhead and signed by the host company.

4. To make it easy for them to say yes, offer to do all of the envelope stuffing and pay for the postage. If they are ok with you having a copy of their database, offer to take care of all of the administrative tasks, leaving them with absolutely nothing to do.

5. Another great way is to offer to do the same for them, with your database.

Action Plan: Make it a Point to have a minimum of one cooperative marketing campaign in action every month & watch the momentum in your business grow!

Be Outstanding!

Jeff Levin, Online Entrepreneur
Founder of GrowthPOD.com - The I Promote You. You Promote Me! Network

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Jeff Levin is the founder of GrowthPOD.com & a pioneer in online cooperative marketing. Visit http://www.growthpod.com/ to learn more.

by Anne Alexander

Jan Carlzon, former president and CEO of Scandinavian Airlines System (SAS) and author of an interesting book called Moments Of Truth, wrote something that every single business of whatever size needs to pay attention to:

“Last year, each of our 10 million customers came in contact with approximately five SAS employees, and this contact lasted an average of 15 seconds each time. Thus, SAS is ‘created’ 50 million times a year, 15 seconds at a time.

“These 50 million “moments of truth” are the moments that ultimately determine whether SAS will succeed or fail as a company. They are the moments when we must prove to our customers that SAS is their best alternative.

“… We have to place responsibility for ideas, decisions, and actions with the people who are SAS during those 15 seconds: ticket agents, flight attendants, baggage handlers, and all the other frontline employees.”

To paraphrase Mr. Carlzon…

Your business is ‘created’ with every contact you have with a customer or prospect, sometimes only 15 seconds at a time. These mini ‘moments of truth’ are the moments that ultimately determine whether your business will succeed or fail. They are the moments when you must prove to your customers that doing business with you is their best alternative.

Can you think of some 15 second moments of truth in your business?
Here are just a very few to consider:

How do you or your employees answer the phone?

What does your voicemail message REALLY sound like?

What is the first thing you say at the beginning of a sales call or when a prospect calls you?

What do you say at the end of a sales call?

How quickly do you respond to email and phone messages?

How do you and your employees describe your business when they are not working, but meeting people socially?

Use this simple format to identify and transform your business’ moments of truth:

Moments Of Truth Worksheet

Moment of Truth:

What you currently do:

What your competition typically does:

What you can do so your customer can’t help but say “WOW!":

If you want to give your business a powerful “Wow” tune up, then once a week, take 15 minutes and write up at least one “moment of truth” for your business. After a year, you’ll have improved your business in 52 ways and given your customers much more of the “Wow” that you need to if you want your business to thrive well into the future.

Anne Alexander, president of Authentic Alternatives, Inc., based in Fort Collins, CO, works with business owners and managers all over the U.S. to develop strategies and systems that dramatically increase their bottom line profits. She can be reached at (970) 672-4946, anne@authentic-alternatives.com or http://www.authentic-alternatives.com.