Archive for the ‘Referrals’ Category

Do you Know Where Your Geese Are?

Friday, May 20th, 2022

9-4-16 geese
So, you have a business and you are good at what you do, so you get a few referrals . . .

but not as many as you would like, right?

Although I have over 10 systems I use to help clients systemize the getting of referrals, today we are going to talk about just one of them.

Geese

I guess, I need to back up a bit and tell you what geese have to do with referrals.

Let’s call your ideal client/patient/customer a “golden egg”

You want more golden eggs – we all do.

So which would you rather have – the golden egg, or the goose that laid the golden egg?

Who will be laying a lot more.

Of course, we all want the goose.

So how does this apply to getting referrals?

Easy

You want to find the people (geese) who know people who can be your golden eggs.

An example might help.

Let’s say you have a landscaping and tree service.

Instead of only going to leads group meetings where you are hoping to find potential clients from referrals from home business owners, the Mary Kay lady in the group, the lawyer, insurance agent or accountant who are there looking for small business or individual people as clients, how about this?

One of your geese – and you will probably have many – might be a landscape architect.

Those people are doing the design of landscaping, which presumably needs taken care of after it’s all installed.

Another might be the facilities managers for hotels, country clubs or other businesses that have property with trees on it they are responsible for maintaining.

So, the way to think about this is to figure out what groups or associations those people might belong to and hang out with.

Now, just to make your brain really hurt, you can go one more level up and look for the grandma goose!

What’s a grandma goose you ask?

Well, that’s the goose who knows and is connected to large numbers of your geese!

So, continuing with our example, the grandma goose could be the head of a local trade association or group of facilities managers or group of landscape architects.

Now that person would really be a find.

So after identifying and locating maybe 5 or 6 grandma geese for different niches where your geese live, next you need to find a way to meet with, get to know and build trust with those people.

You can do your research by checking out their LinkedIn or Facebook accounts to learn about them personally, find out their interests, likes, etc

One tip, if your grandma goose is the head of a local association, trade group or something, it’s actually best to target the former Chairman or CEO, not the current one.

The current person might be very busy, but the previous head has stepped down and is probably much more available and equally well connected.

How to develop relationships with these people will be the topic of another post – this one is long enough as it is . . .

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How To Make Your Competitor’s Ads Invisible

Tuesday, May 17th, 2022

blank billboard

 

Wouldn’t you like it if you could make your competitor’s advertising and marketing invisible? It would be much easier to get sales then, wouldn’t it?

With all the advertising exposures we’re exposed to every day, our brains deal with it by ignoring anything that isn’t important and relevant to us at that time. Here’s an example you can probably relate to.

Think back to the last time you were getting ready to buy a car. You probably noticed all the TV ads, newspaper ads, Auto Trader magazines and everywhere else car advertising appears. You were in the market to buy a car, so all those advertising messages were important and relevant to you.

What happened after you bought the car? Did you notice any more car ads? You weren’t in the market any more so the ads became invisible to you.

So what does this have to do with making your competitor’s ads invisible?

Lots.

If you can develop a trusting relationship with your customers so that they already know where they’ll go next time they need your product or service, then they won’t even notice any of your competitor’s advertising or marketing.

So how do you do this?

By doing the thing you’re probably not doing now – keeping in touch with your customers to build and strengthen your relationship with them. Did you know the biggest reason people or businesses change suppliers is not the product quality, price or even service, it’s because they don’t feel appreciated?

You can show appreciation for your customers by sending them birthday cards, holiday cards, and making personal contact on the phone. When was the last time any business you do business with communicated with you personally?

In all the years I’ve been doing marketing consulting, I’ve never seen any client who understood this or kept in touch with their customers anywhere near as often as they should. They typically only think about getting new customers and spend all their money there, ignoring the customers they already have, and losing them along the way.

Whenever I tell clients to do this, the objection I always get is that it’s too time consuming and although business owners understand the need to keep in touch with their customers, they just don’t do it.

The good news is that there is now technology that can do this for you. You can send out handwritten greeting cards with your own message and signature automatically to your customers for only a dollar or two – and that includes the stamp.

To learn the details, email me at joemcvoy@gmail.com