Referral Marketing Success Story

January 8, 2008 | Leave a Comment

“I get at least a hundred times the referrals now as I did before I had a referral plan.”
      ~ Scott Hensley - Affordable Concrete Cutting

This is an article I pulled directly from a Duct Tape Marketing email newsletter. It showcases the power of Referral Marketing for a Boston contractor. If you are interested in achieving the same kind of success with your word of mouth marketing efforts, visit our site at www.wordofmouthmanager.com

Today I want to share with you, in it’s entirety, a copy of a letter I received from a small business owner who implemented a number of suggestions I gave him in the Duct Tape Marketing book. I chose to share this not to point out how brilliant I am - writing this stuff is the easy part sometimes - but to showcase how acting on what you read - the really hard part - can pay huge dividends.

Scott’s business cuts concrete, not exactly your Web2.0 business - yet, he has developed a simple, but systematic approach to generating referrals and shares it very specifically in this great letter - thanks Scott

Dear John,

I implemented what I call a “passive referral system” days after I read your book. I have a small business in a niche industry and have always been successful at getting the calls, business and the money.

Either way, I can always use more calls, business and money. I never realized the importance of a referral system because I always got referrals without trying, most likely because of my niche.

I am not a “come out and ask” sales pusher type so some of your suggestions don’t work for my personality. I am sure they work, don’t get me wrong, it is just not something you could convince me to do.

Therefore I took the main message from your program, which is to simply have a referral plan and I implemented it. I will explain to you how I do it in a minute but the reason I am writing is to tell you that I get at least a hundred times the referrals now as I did before I had a referral plan.

I get calls from new customers that mention people that I have never heard of and say “so and so referred me!” Simply having a plan is enough for me and I want you to know I would have never thought of it without your newsletters and your book.
 
I merged my referral plan into my marketing plan to some degree. I derive a lot of business from the yellow pages and unfortunately yellow page people are loyal to the yellow pages and the next time they need a concrete cutter they will return to the yellow pages and wind up being serviced by my competition or who I like to call the “uninsured toothless cave man.”

As a self proclaimed marketing professional I like to vision it as similar to the old west, my competition and I are Ranchers. These yellow page customers are wild cattle and when the come up to one of my fences I open the fence quickly and drag them in. I then take my branding iron and brand them. I send them to re-education training, if you will. Everything that they see or hear in the next several days is “Affordable Concrete Cutting” and my logo, so I can gently hypnotize them into never even thinking of leaving my ranch and when they call home or call their friends they tell everyone what a fantastic experience they have had here and how it would be great for their family, friends and colleagues to join them.

On top of that I keep my fences in tip top shape by keeping in touch with my customers by using (USPS Direct Mail) mailings every month or by sending them a decent gift for no reason other than to remind them of the great experience that they have had here. Now, my competition on the other hand, has a real problem with keeping their fences up and the fact is that their customers escape most of the time.

This is when I open my fence up and persuade them into coming in. I then hold them down and “re-brand” them (most were never branded in the first place) and again gently hypnotize them into forgetting the competition and to never even thinking of leaving.  We provide better than great service, we are on time every time and the customer’s satisfaction is priority. Why wouldn’t they tell everyone? Well as you said it yourself because they were never asked to! So now I ask. I don’t ask verbally but I make it more than known that referrals are very important to me.
 
My first contact with the customer is via a phone call inquiry. I mention my company name several times and I make the customer feel great about using us. Next my guy goes to the site and performs the cutting. This is where the marketing and branding or re-branding begins. Once the job has been completed successfully my men give the customer a paid invoice and are instructed to hand the customer ten or so business cards and to ask that they mention it to everyone. The old “your best compliment is a referral” thing.

Unfortunately, sometimes this part gets left out. I counter this by sending each customer a computer generated paid invoice with an insurance certificate request form and a W-9. On the invoice I hand write a thank you and I enclose several business cards and a Rolodex card.

Now, as part of your referral suggestion I put a big sticker on the envelope that reads “Thank You! We appreciate your referrals.” Then I prepare a Thank You card that basically says if you were happy with our service then please tell everyone ( the key is to make sure they are happy in the first place.) I don’t mail this until a day after I mail the invoice. Then I prepare a “gift pack” which is a bubble mailer (lumpy mail) that contains a gift, a pocket knife with my logo on it, a mouse pad, some pens or a couple of pads of paper. Inside the mailing is a bunch of business cards and I don’t mail this until the end of the week because I have to go to the Post Office and by the end of the week there are about 20 - 30.

Every new customer is placed on my mailing list and they are mailed a gift, a letter or a post card every month, come Hell or high water! Since I started using the stickers and the Thank You cards my business has exploded and is increasing exponentially.

 Just a small suggestion for referrals works incredibly. Now I know you would probably say that verbally coming out and asking works better and I am sure it does but that’s not my style. The point is that thanks to you I have a referral system that is active and in place and it is working.
 
Thanks
 
Sincerely,
Scott Hensley
http://www.affordableconcretecutting.com/

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Video - Small Business Branding

January 4, 2008 | Leave a Comment

What is Small Business Branding, a John Jantsch video.

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A Case for Duct Tape Marketing

October 17, 2007 | Leave a Comment

Ever wonder why is it so hard to market your small business?

You don’t have to look far to understand why this question plagues so many.  It really has to do with why folks get into a business in the first place. 

The typical small business in America is started by someone who knows how to do something. It might be how to prepare taxes, how to assemble a certain type of gizmo, how to wire a ceiling fan, how to administer a network, or how to plan a wedding. Almost never does this know-how include being able to market a business that does those things.

What if marketing was easy, almost automatic?

But what if I told you, no matter what your business claims to do or provide, you’re actually in the marketing business. That’s right–every business is actually a marketing business. Think about it for a moment. Do you really have a business without being able to reach and motivate a customer?

You are in the marketing business! Marketing is an all-encompassing outlook that must inform every activity of your business.  It isn’t just a department within your business. When you discover this outlook, marketing your business gets really, really easy.

 Install the system - work the system

The small business owner who uses the Duct Tape Marketing system comes to define marketing as: Getting people who have a specific need or problem, to know, like, trust AND contact you. Getting a hot prospect to actually pick up the phone and seek you out is the dream situation for most small business owners. How many times have you made this statement, “if I can only get in front of a qualified prospect I can almost always turn them into a client?” A fully functioning Duct Tape Marketing system is the key to turning more leads into more customers.

Ultimately, with the systematic application of Duct Tape Marketing, the definition of the term marketing evolves to include this all-encompassing view: Getting people who have a specific need or problem to know, like, trust, do business with AND refer you to others who have this same need or problem.

That’s the value of a proven system: it delivers the keys to success every time.  And it helps you leverage MORE success.

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The Marketing ‘Operating System’

October 1, 2007 | Leave a Comment

Forest for the Trees chose Duct Tape Marketing as the principal foundation upon which we base everything we do. It is our ‘Marketing OS’ - the operating system that allows businesses to systematically create a predictable stream of qualified prospects and customers.

Hear the ‘Duct Tape Marketing Story’ from John Jantsch himself.

The Duct Tape Marketing system was born out of an initial failure to serve the small business clients that were drawn to my agency over ten years ago.

Shortly after departing college I went to work for a large advertising agency. It only took me about five years in this job to realize I had to own my business.

At first, I went to work serving the marketing project needs of very large corporations but found that I was always much more interested in working with small business owners.

But, I found it very difficult to help small business owners using the traditional advertising agency model. Small business owners simply couldn’t afford to spend marketing dollars on image advertising, creative briefs and research teams to form their marketing strategies.

I found the missing ingredient to my puzzle in Michael Gerber’s brilliant small business book titled the E-Myth Revisited. Through the E-Myth, Gerber was one of the first to introduce the idea of the duplicatable small business system.

While I had found that small business owners had little trouble grasping systems for things like accounting and shipping, no one was talking about marketing as a system.

It became painfully clear to me that only way to effectively deliver simple, effective and affordable marketing results for small business owners was through the development and application of proven set of marketing principles and strategies.

This system had to be duplicatable, produce predictable results and come with a fixed, almost product like, price tag.

The Duct Tape Marketing system is the outcome of over twenty years of work in the real world small business marketing laboratory and my continuing passion.

I still love working with small business owners and do so everyday. I derive considerable joy knowing that thousands of small business owners have now succeeded growing a business the Duct Tape Marketing way.

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