Every business wants to attract new customers and grow new business, but very few focus their energies on building lasting relationships with their existing customers. Most assume that their existing customers are happy and that new business growth will come from acquiring new customers.
Are they wrong? Are you wrong?
Yes and no.
Your existing customers may well be perfectly happy but that doesn’t mean that they’re going to stay with you forever. And yes, new customers and clients are essential to the growth of any business but they’re expensive to get and keep. It is a marketing strategy that emphasizes the need to ensure customer satisfaction and retention. It’s not just about good customer service. It means maintaining communications with your existing customers and growing their involvement with your business over time.
So what are the real benefits of good relationship marketing and what should you do?
Any relationship marketing campaign should have a few aims:
Existing customers should be the cornerstone of your marketing efforts and deserve their own marketing plan and dedicated efforts.
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Are you getting as many referrals from your referral marketing? Do your customers send you new business? What about your contacts or other businesses you deal with? If you provide a high quality product or service but are not getting the number of referrals that you would like, then a simple, planned referral program can be a great way of getting more.
Your referral program should include:
Rewarding the people that send you referrals is not only the right thing to do but it can also encourage more people to do the same. You have a few choices to make when it comes to rewarding referrals:
You want to make sending you business as easy as possible; so, you should create simple tools to smooth the process. This can be as simple as making sure that every customer has plenty of your business cards to hand out. You could also create a specific gift voucher for them to use or include tools and forms on your website.
Take a mental walk through the process of someone referring business to you. Point out the places where it might be difficult and find ways to make it easier. One of the best tools you can create is a special offer for the person that they refer to you. This will make it easier for them to talk about your business and convince someone to get in touch.
If you’re not getting as many referrals as you would like there’s often a simple explanation – you’re not asking. If people don’t know that you want referrals they may never think to send you any.
So what do people need to know?
First off they need to know that you welcome referrals. Make a point of asking for referrals from satisfied customers and clients. Having a referral program in place will help this but only if you promote it. When you start your program make sure you contact all your customers and professional contacts and let them know about it. After that you can promote it in your newsletters, on your website, in your email signature or even on your invoices. From time to time you might consider a marketing campaign just for your referral program.
Once they know you welcome referrals the next step is to show them the process – i.e. how can they send you a referral and what will happen after that? Before people will be happy to send you their friends, family, colleagues and customers they will want to know that you will look after them.
Finally, use the referral rewards to honestly thank people who have helped you out. If someone has gone to the trouble of sending you new business you need to make sure they know it was appreciated.
The first step in any referral program has to be to deliver a great product or service but if you do, a simple plan for encouraging and handling referrals will help you get the most out of the goodwill you create.
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Buying leads is a common mortgage lead generation method. Over the last few years it’s been a very effective strategy indeed. Due to high demand, if you just “did the numbers”, it was relatively easy to make a profit.
Unfortunately, things have tightened, causing two problems. First off, demand has obviously weakened. Secondly, your prospect still gets flooded with calls from competing mortgage agents. What’s worse is that your prospect can’t tell you apart from the others. To her all mortgage lenders look and sound the same.
You need to separate from the pack. But how? Cold calling and prospecting is hard work so buying leads should still be part of your overall strategy. You can use the services of different mortgage lead generation companies or partner with someone to cold call for you. Buying leads may still provide some work, but smart mortgage agents are busy building a network of referring allied professionals – and setting themselves apart form the pack in the process.
An allied professional is a professional service provider who frequently comes in contact with your potential prospects, but who doesn’t sell mortgages themselves. They could be real estate agents, accountants, insurance agents or lawyers. We all know that referred business is better business. Referred prospects will likely know a bit about you and you come with an endorsement from the person doing the referring – a person they already trust and do business with. In short, the prospect will listen to you, take your advice, and buy from you precisely because their other advisor introduced you. Your job is simply to make the process easy and comfortable for the client.
It’s worth remembering however that referral business doesn’t come for free. While there may be no monetary cost, you need to invest your time, energy and professional reputation into building the right relationships.
They’re not just helping you. You’re helping them. Most pros want to take care of as many of their clients’ needs as possible. By doing this they raise the chances of keeping that client over the long-term. They also like to be looked on as the expert and the ‘go to person’ with the connections. If you do your job well your referral partner will look good too. Moreover, by having “his people” service his clients he lowers the chance of someone else stealing the business.
If you’re smart, you’ll also look for ways to refer business back to your professional partners. Not only will it cement the relationship between you but it will also encourage them to send you even more referrals.
It’s important to remember that you want allied professionals who are successful and who are working as hard as you. That’s step one – drawing up a list of possible partners.
From there your goal is to make working with you attractive, simple and rewarding for your potential partners. Developing and working with networks of allied professional is not a cheap mortgage lead generation tactic. It might not cost you any cash but it certainly takes time and effort.
OK, sounds great. But how do it get started?
First of all, this is a soft-sell approach with a focus. Your objective is to create business alliances, not to sit back and wait for them to come to you. At the same time using a hard-sell approach to build these alliances is likely to put other professionals off working with you. They may be afraid you unleash your hard-sell techniques on their loyal customers. Be professional, be willing to help and be straight to the point.
Develop a Specialty or Niche
To attract professional partners, you need something that sets you apart from your competitors. Instead of being just another mortgage guy, you want to become the new home mortgage lead generation specialist, the small business owner’s mortgage pro, the multi-unit mortgage advisor or the government secured mortgage expert. Don’t fear being pigeon-holed, people will remember you and you can leverage that into new fields over time.
Build a Local Territory
It can be as big or as small as you want. It doesn’t even have to be your own neighborhood. If there’s a more lucrative part of town make that your territory. You want to be the local expert that all the allied professionals call when they have work in that area.
By drawing a defined territory it’s easier for you to manage, market to, and defend. Plus, it’s easier to travel and meet these professionals in person at their office, over lunch or at a professional business function.
Finally, success breeds success. If you can demonstrate your success, that encourages professionals to work with you. That’s much easier to accomplish in a well-defined territory.
Build and Demonstrate Your Value
Become an expert. Hold workshops, teach courses, present to local business groups and write articles for the local press. This raises your profile and demonstrates your expertise to other working professionals in your area. Make sure to keep clean copies and reprints of all your press (articles, write-ups, and reports) and use this material as supporting evidence of your expertise when approaching potential partners. All this makes you more attractive to customers too – making it easier to refer business to you.
Hire or Partner With an Assistant
You must be on top of your physical game. You want to be rested, cool, and calm when you hold meetings with the allied professionals. This is hard to do if you’re running around all day chasing leads and sales. Let your assistant do that.
Rewarding Referrals
Depending on your local rules and regulations, always reward referrals that turn into business. You should even consider giving a small gift for an honest lead or referral even if it doesn’t turn into business. Not only is it good business etiquette but it also encourages more of the same behavior.
Referral fees and rewards can be a touchy issue for some people. So, leave the possibility open and ask your allied professional if they have thoughts for or against it. Cash incentives may, in some cases, be too blunt so be creative in rewarding those that help you grow your business.
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MLM lead generation…
Building a successful MLM business depends on finding the right distributors, which is why most network marketers ask the same question:
When you first start your MLM business, you’ll likely be advised to invite friends, co-workers, family, strangers and anyone else you can grab to a hotel room for a business opportunity presentation. This can be an effective way to find distributors but there are only so many times you can do this – and only so many friends and family you can drag along.
What’s needed is a lead generation strategy that can help you connect with the right people – people who are interested in an opportunity, won’t waste your time, and are ready and able to take action.
Right now, there are people in your town or city looking for a business opportunity. Some are looking to start their own business. Others want a franchise. Many are looking for something inexpensive and simple to start, run, and grow.
It’s this last group that are perfect candidates for MLM, network marketing, or direct sales style businesses. Your job is to use sound marketing and lead generation tactics to attract them to you and your business. Use marketing and advertising strategies to become a magnet for business opportunity seekers and you’ll soon find yourself achieving your goals and developing lead generation systems that you can pass on to your distributors to help them grow their businesses (and yours).
If you design your marketing to attract professionals who are interested in a business opportunity, you’ll spend less time persuading. Your website will do the pre-selling for you. The online business presentation and autoresponder messages will answer your prospects common questions and weed out ‘tire kickers’– saving you considerable time. What you are left with are motivated people, interested in your business and ready for training.
And the best part? With a strong, automated system in place, it becomes even easier for you to train your team to copy your success – growing your business even faster.
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