“ONE CUSTOMER, WELL TAKEN CARE OF, COULD BE MORE VALUABLE THAN $10,000 WORTH OF ADVERTISING.” – JIM ROHN
There’s a simple premise behind referrals, and it falls into 2-parts – be referable, and reward the behavior you want more of. Being referable, of course, means delivering great work and service. You need to be a company worth talking about to others.
Most good companies are getting referrals right now, but many in a haphazard way. If you were to increase that number of referrals 3, 5, or 10 fold you’d be very busy!
So, how do you do this? You do this by building a strategy for collecting and maximizing referral generation. Here are four ways:
1. Ask for referrals
It’s amazing what you can get just because you asked. It’s that simple. In business, nothing in life happens until you ask for the sale. So when you have finished a great job for your client and they are thrilled with you, be sure to give them a referral request form.
Most of you will double or triple your number of referrals by simply adding this component into your window cleaning process. If this is uncomfortable for you or your technicians, at the close of the job make it a policy to leave a packet of information that includes this form.
2. Ask again for the referral
Credit: Tyler Buell
My staff then makes a call the next day to say “thank you” for the opportunity to serve. What else do you think we do? My staff asks for referrals and/or refers to the referral form we left with them asking if they’d like for us to send them some referral certificates too. They almost always say yes.
But you might get their voice mail. So, my admins send an email the next day repeating the same: thank you and we love referrals! And we do it one more time with a special “letter from the president” saying thank you, etc. with a link in the email where they can send us a referral for cash or discounts off their next service. All of this is automated of course.
3. Follow up with the referrals
Once you get the referrals, you need a process for delivering them a compelling offer to try out your services. A sequence of emails or letters with a time-sensitive offer, and testimonies from your happy clients – including the friend who referred them to you – will help convert these referral leads into jobs.
4. Reward referrals that turn into jobs and the referrer too
We give our referrals our first-time customer discounts. These discounts are also in our promotions to entice the referral to schedule service. Not only that, but the referrer also gets a bonus of 10% of the job. This is returned to them in cash or future discounts off their next service. Our promotions to our customers say, “You May Never Have To Pay For Window Cleaning Again!” … and is a very powerful built out system.
Look at it this way. If you do 100 jobs per month, get 20% to give you one referral, convert 50% of them into jobs at $400 per (our job average), that’s another $50,000 per year… Free!
So as you can see, a system of generating referrals is important. And it works! Referral generation revenue was #3 in our marketing arsenal last year. But, it goes back to the adage, if you ask you shall receive. Implement a formal policy in your operation to garner referrals. Monitor and track it and you will see the increase in referrals. So instead of happenstance, it becomes a formal system.
Of course, the by-product to this is happy clients will talk about you regardless and if you have done your job, giving the customer a world-class service experience – before, during, and after the job, it will fuel the referrals.
Looking for a high-level window cleaning, pressure washing Business Coach to take your company to the next level? Have a specific question you’re stumped on? Reach out and I will be happy to help you…
Thanks for reading!
Jim DuBois is the founder of Squeegee Pros, Inc. out of Mooresville, NC, and is the creator of WindowWashingWealth.com. Visit the site for a FREE MARKETING REPORT, and BUSINESS BUILDING MANUAL. Window Washing Wealth is a high-level business coaching program that specializes in aggressive marketing tactics, systems implementation, and growth trajectory execution – all leading to market domination on auto-pilot. We are changing the way window cleaners do business. Email questions you’d like to see answered in this column directly to [email protected] or call 704-451-0409.