Asking for Business Referrals: 7 Proven Ways that Work Today
In business some things never change, like the power of a personal referral or word-of-mouth advertising. Then again, some things in business are constantly going through changes, like the way those personal referrals are gained and communicated. Let’s take a quick tour through current best practices for winning those ever-so-powerful personal referrals. 1. Ask. Simply asking customers for referrals is the traditional, time-honored strategy for getting business referrals. It’s based on the fundamental truth that if you don’t ask for something, you won’t receive it. Most of the following strategies, by the way, can generally be filed under the broad label of “ASK!” There are a few tips that can help you become better at asking customers for referrals. First, be sensitive to situations and relationships and craft your requests based on those factors. For example, it’s appropriate to ask established clients and customers for referrals as well as brand new clients and customers. However, the way you ask needs to be different. With new clients you would want to say something like, “I want this to be a long-term relationship and will always do my best to meet your needs. If I do that, can I count on you for some referrals?” With established – and happy – clients, you can take a more direct approach. 2. Leverage your links. Any email that goes out from your business with a special offer – or great content – should include an easy way for recipients to share it with their friends. The same principle applies to things such as “Thank-you” pages or other web pages that could be appealing to the friends of visitors. Make it easy for them to send these offers to others. 3. Establish a referral program. Award perks to established customers or clients who refer people to you. A good way to boost this is to incorporate it into a feedback or survey system. When you get positive survey results, conclude the survey with a pitch for your referral program that clearly states the benefit for the existing customer. 4. Give a perk for giving gift cards or gift certificates. Restaurants and movie theaters are doing this a lot today: The people who buy a gift cards also gets a small gift card themselves. Of course, many people end up buying the gift cards for personal use, but hey, that’s good for sales too! 5. Be a referral giver yourself. The Golden Rule – Do unto others as you would have others do unto you – is good to follow when it comes to referrals. If you’re always asking for referrals, but never offering them, how can you expect your clients to give you their support? Start banking some goodwill. Don’t expect an immediate double-digit ROI, although you might be surprised! 6. Exploit LinkedIn connections. Organically build your LinkedIn network and then find connections you share with individuals you would like to be introduced to. You need to be sure that the people you approach when you’re asking for a referral or introduction don’t feel like they’re being used, so be sure that you have an honest relationship with them. Always ask if it’s okay that you mention their name when you used the LinkedIn message service to send prospects a note. 7. Track your success. This is probably the...
read moreWill Your Retirement be a Pain or Pleasure? A Strategy for Success
Editor’s Note: This post is sponsored by Capital One Spark. All the comments and opinions are my own. All small business owners plan to exit someday, but the most recent figures I’ve seen say that 72 percent don’t have a real plan in place that can make that happen…at least not without having to substantially downgrade their personal lifestyle. There’s another dimension in this problem: Only 32 percent of the workers in our nation’s smallest companies have any savings plan. Further, according to the recent Capital One’s Spark Business Barometer survey, the percentage of small businesses that offer 401(k) plans to their employees has dropped almost 50 percent since Q4 2014 – from 24 to 13 percent. Let’s look at this from two points of view. First, for the small business owners and employees of small businesses, failing to plan for retirement will result in all kinds of financial and personal problems. Money will be stretched thin to the breaking point when they try to scrape by on social security plus any meager savings. Assets will have to be sold. Dreams of relaxing and traveling during retirement will go out the window. Second, a huge group of unprepared retirees will be hitting the social security rolls at a time when there will be fewer and fewer wage earners paying into the Social Security Trust fund. Who knows how that drama will play out? However, it’s a safe bet that one way or another, social security benefits will be decreased. What is sad about this situation is the fact that small business is the economic engine that has always driven our nation’s prosperity, but the owners and workers in that segment of the economy are among the least fortunate when retirement years arrive. I mentioned 401(k) plans above and they probably embody the best strategy for overcoming all of the hurdles small business owners face in providing an adequate retirement for themselves, as well as for their employees. There are other sanctioned retirement accounts worth considering, but they often don’t work out as well for the small business owner: Simple IRA. These accounts have lower contribution limits than the 401(k) and any money you put into a Simple IRA counts against any 401(k) contributions you make in a given tax year. This impacts small business owners who have a side job that comes with a 401(k). SEP IRA. SEP stands for Simplified Employee Pension. A SEP IRA covers all of your employees as well as yourself. All contributions come from the small business owner; employees do not contribute. Also, everyone in your SEP IRA gets the same contribution each year, so whatever you give yourself, everyone gets. Because 401(k) plans have been around a long time, there are many good options for you and they can be very “user friendly.” You want to find plans that are easy to set up and manage, and have very low operating expenses. Those seem to be the selling points for Capital One’s ShareBuilder 401(k). According to its figures, getting started with a ShareBuilder 401(k) will cost some 35 to 40 percent less for employers starting their first 401(k), compared to a 401(k) from a traditional provider. Also, virtually the entire process can be “paperless” and completed online in about 20 minutes. ShareBuilder 401(k)...
read moreThe secret to writing killer small business taglines
We devote a lot of space here presenting a wide range of marketing plans and sometimes they can be very involved and demand a lot of planning, careful execution, and even financial investment. However, when I reflect on my success, I have to give a lot of credit to four little words, my tagline: THE Small Business Expert. While a lot of my marketing efforts change, evolve and require constant care and feeding, my tagline – like the Energizer Bunny – keeps going, and going, and going… (Hey, there’s another tagline!) So my question to you is: Do you have a great business tagline? Any tagline? If you already have a tagline for your brand, take a good look at it and see if you think it’s serving you as well as it should. While it’s fantastic to have a tagline that’s so good you never have to change it, it’s not a crime to polish it up from time to time or even start over fresh. Your noticeable difference To craft the best tagline for your business, focus in on the one thing you want to be known for…and this isn’t as simple as it seems. Going through the exercise of discovering this “one thing” will take you deep inside of what your small business is all about. You can’t write a great brand tagline without distilling this essence. Let’s look at a slogan FedEx used for quite sometime: When it absolutely positively has to be there overnight. If many of us were tasked with writing a tagline that expressed this idea, we would come up with something like: The fastest overnight delivery service! Or maybe we would suggest: The most dependable overnight delivery service! The difference between okay and fantastic Why is When it absolutely positively has to be there overnight better than those two merely okay attempts? Here’s the reason: Not only does the FedEx version convey speed and dependability, it adds an emotional element with the words “absolutely positively.” You’ve probably used that phrase before. Remember how your heart was racing when you said it? There was some desperation in your voice. I evoke some emotion and attitude by my use of capitalization in my tagline: THE Small Business Expert. When one plus one is way more than two! The point I’m making is that you need to go beyond merely naming the “attribute” you want to communicate. You want to make it memorable in another way, and adding emotion, attitude, humor, or an appeal to the senses can accomplish this. Let’s look at some of the best brand taglines and see what they add: Melts in your mouth, not in your hand. Humor and senses. What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas. The happiest place on earth. Think outside the bun. Humor Just do it. Emotion and attitude. Mmmm mmmm good! Have it your way. As you look at your business tagline see if you’re touching people in a way that will make it memorable. If you’re able to communicate your main message and leverage one of these other elements – emotions, humor, senses, etc. – you’re touching people in two areas of their brains, and they will remember...
read moreDiscover Small Business Opportunities By Taking an Old Idea and Making it New Again
Not long ago a friend was reminiscing about how he and his wife bought their first video camera when their son was about to be born. It’s a common story for a certain generation. At the time, they were on the cutting edge of the technology because they purchased a camera that took MiniDV tape cassettes. (I would bet that many reading this won’t know what MiniDVs were.) The fascinating thing about personal video is that today everyone records video almost daily, but almost no one goes out and buys a video camera. The function still exists (although it has evolved greatly) but the means of achieving it has changed dramatically. Old ideas made new through technology This type of evolution is important to understand because it often provides business opportunities. New businesses are founded and old businesses are transformed or enhanced by recognizing how a new technology (or changing social conditions) can be applied to an old idea. Let’s look at some. The agora In Ancient Greece, the agora was the public space where local residents would find the market. It could also be a meeting space. Pull this idea forward a couple thousand years and you have eBay, Facebook, Etsy and other public markets and meeting spaces. The overarching concept that you need to grasp is that people have a built-in need to trade, buy, and meet freely in groups. This human need will never change, but the means for fulfilling it will change as new technologies are developed. Radio If you’re a big fan of “A Christmas Story,” you’ll remember the scenes where the family gathers around the radio to listen to their favorite programs. Podcasts fulfill this same function today. The difference is that by virtue of the Internet, we’re able to listen to programs that interest us on our schedules – we don’t have to adhere to the schedules of the broadcasters. Small business owners should note the rising popularity of podcasts. Think back to those old-time radio shows. What is notable about them? They usually had one single sponsor. If you establish a podcast, you will be that single sponsor. They can be great advertising. Home delivery There was a time when milk trucks ran morning routes and the neighborhood grocer would deliver your order the same day you phoned it in, or sent your kid down with a list of items. The rise of the supermarket killed home grocery deliveries to a great extent, but technology is bringing it back. Amazon and others are working hard to leverage technology and logistics to make home deliveries common again. Lots of innovators are busy in this area and I suppose it won’t be long before drones or self-driving vehicles are out making deliveries all day long, and it won’t be just groceries. Messaging With this one, I’m not going to harken back to “the good old days.” I’m just rolling back the technology to an earlier era on the Internet. For many of us, the first Internet messaging app we used was ICQ. When you say the letters it sounds like, “I seek you.” Slack and HipChat are taking the basic messaging function and tossing in the kitchen sink by integrating it with a wide array of other apps. This is less a case...
read moreThis Week in Small Business: Mount up, Rev your Engines and Get Ready to Win the Small Business Race!
A lot of advice this week is directed toward helping you tune up your website. So as we go into racing season – the Indy 500 and Triple Crown events – get your web presence running efficiently at full speed and stretch out your lead over the competition! Leadership, management and productivity One of the big advantages of a WordPress website is the plethora of plugins available. Check out these 24 must-have plugins for your small business site. And if you want to find out what’s wrong with your website, review the findings of this study that looked at 200 million page crawls. If you’re in retail, you need to understand how employee satisfaction impacts your bottom line. And in any small business you need to grasp the relationship between customer loyalty and expectations. Discover how the right analytics can strengthen your customer engagement. This guide to understanding your buyer’s journey will help you do better market research. Marketing and sales When you’re thinking about monetizing your website, consider these alternatives to Google’s Adwords. Jayson Demers gives you seven simple changes that can make your website more visible to search engines. Jason Acidre says that search engines are moving to brand-related metrics to determine search results rankings. If that’s the case you need to use modern SEO to build your brand authority. Facebook is still the Mac Daddy of social media platforms so these 11 little-known marketing features could be valuable to your small business. This Search Engine Watch article sums up LinkedIn’s Jason Miller’s talk on how to achieve “face-melting content marketing ROI.” If you’re a life-long veteran of advertising, direct mail, and cold calling, you may not appreciate the hidden value of content marketing. One writer stopped publishing on LinkedIn, but he thinks maybe you shouldn’t. Find out why. The biggest barrier to social media marketing can be finding the time to get it done. Brett Relander has some ideas how to solve that problem. Entrepreneurship, startups and innovation Planning a new startup? Maybe you better locate in one of these cities that are proven to be best for small business. This Nashville small business is doing a great job at competing with the big names in the fashion industry. See how they’re doing it. Politics, government and the economy Small business owners don’t like it when leadership is unsettled. That’s probably why this year’s presidential election cycle is so vexing for SBOs. Capital One Spark gave me early access to some survey results and asked me to look them over for a post. What fascinated me was that while there is a somewhat gloomy attitude among small business owners, younger owners – and especially millennials – have a positive...
read moreSmall Business Owners Lagging in Technology. Is that You?
Editor’s Note: This post is sponsored by Capital One Spark. All the comments and opinions are my own. Looking forward to the November presidential election, pundits are already saying that the candidate who best leverages digital analytics and marketing is likely to win. The same is true in small business. That’s why the results of a Capital One’s Spark Business Barometer should be a wakeup call for many small business owners. Here are some of the findings: Only 21 percent of small business owners are currently using data analytics to help them make business decisions. Some 40 percent of all small business owners are not using social media in their businesses at all. Of the owners who do use social media, only 26 percent are “very familiar” with the ways to take advantage of commerce opportunities and market their products via social media. Tech savvy small business owners have several ways they can use a wide range of new tools to get an edge on the competition. Smart use of technology and other available modern offerings will help you lower costs, make smarter decisions, and boost sales – just to mention the main categories. Let’s look at some highlights in each of these areas. Lower costs Productivity is often what separates the winners from the losers, and small business owners must be constantly on the lookout for anything that boosts productivity, even marginally. In the long run, it’s almost always a long string of small productivity improvements that delivers high profitability. Cloud services are a major player in lowering costs and improving productivity. It can be as simple as efficient file sharing and document handling via something like DropBox or Office365. Or if your office is still tied down to an ancient fax machine, you need to check out services like Adobe FormsCentral and DocuSign. Whenever something can be done more easily online through the cloud, it delivers a productivity boost. And remember, time saved in one area of your operation can be invested in another area. This makes it especially attractive to streamline legacy operations, and this is certainly true with the various cloud-based accounting and billing options you have today. For service providers who invoice billable hours, a cloud-based app like OfficeTime, for example, will greatly improve productivity and help prevent losing any billable time. Since we’re on the topic of lowering costs, let me step “out of the cloud” for a moment and point out another area where many small businesses are missing the boat, according to the Capital One survey. Although a majority of small business owners have business credit cards, only 29 percent use rewards to pay for business expenses. Further, only 10 percent say they use rewards to boost their bottom lines. You know, the yearly fee you pay for your business credit card isn’t tied to how often you use it, yet only 17 percent of small business owners say they use their business credit card as their primary method of making business purchases. A majority of small business owners continue to rely onusing savings or checking accounts. What’s the cost of those checks? Do you get rewards for writing checks? If you found more ways to use your business credit card, you would enjoy more rewards that could filter down to...
read more