Recruit an army of sales people for free

Subjects: Turn your customers into sales people on commission thru referrals
Principle: Give incentive to your customers to sell your stuff to friends

Potential Worth: Extra sales at no extra effort

As you know by now, I am a great admirer of elegant ways to create extra value in a relationship between two or more parties.

One method I like is to give real incentives to the other parties to do what you want them to do. Sure, even without doing nothing, some random kind soul will send their friends your way. But why depending on good fortune and not putting in place a solid, well structured referral method?

I love referrals (see the other postings on the subject): referred customers are, statistically, the ideal crowd – they negotiate less, purchase more and more often.

So, how do we turn our customers into active referral machines? How do we turn them into evangelizers of our business? There are many methods of course: today we take one specific example.

I take this example from one of my favorite authors, Claude Hopkins, from his book “My Life in Advertising”. On page 87 he describes how he transformed the clients of his shoes business into an army of sales persons. How did he do it? Simple: he shared with them the benefits of any sale they would bring in.

Basically, he sent coupons to his customers saying “Look, for any extra pair of shoes you sell to your friends, you get 10% off on your next purchase. So, if you sell 10 friends, you get a free pair of shoes”. I love it: so simple, linear, clean and sincere.

How can we apply it? Well, let’s say you have a truck rental business, or a termite removing business or a go-kart racing place. Just make to all of your customers the proposition “Ehi, dear XXX, if you liked the experience, why not sharing with a friend? And on top of that, you get free – blank -(fill the blank with: truck-rental, termite removal, go-kart race day etc). For every friend you bring, you get 10% off. Bring 10 friends and get it free”

The beauty of this model is that you pay only for results: no base salary for your army of sales people. The more they bring results (real new customers), the more you pay “commission” to them, but the more you get business at no marketing and sales cost!

Sure, you have to give up part of your pie, but I prefer 90% of a bigger pie than 100% of nothing…

Happy recruiting of sales people,

Kramerilio in USA