Greetings Flooring Dealers!
Ask for referrals on every job
On the previous installment I mentioned three of the most powerful strategies for recession-proofing your business:
- Marketing/Communicating monthly to your herd of past clients. (Home Advisor is the tool for this.)
- Joint Ventures with other businesses.
- Referral system.
I preach that you need to have an actual system in place for generating referrals. It’s too critical for your survival and prosperity to leave to chance or to the moods of your sales people. I recommend making the entire sales process—from the time a client walks in the door, through the installation, and up through the post-installation follow-up into a gigantic system that moves the client towards giving you referrals. Compels them to give you referrals.
But all the systems and strategies for planting referral seeds, motivating referrals, rewarding referrals, etc., don’t do a lick of good if NO ONE ASKS for the referral.
You should be training your sales team—week in and week out—to ask for and get referrals.
One member was having trouble getting his sales team to bring back completed Referral Request Forms. So he began holding back their paychecks until they brought in the completed form for every job. He required his team to treat the Referral Request form with the same respect as the purchase order, invoice, etc. The very next month they generated over $90,000 from this one strategy. (And did it in this slow market.)
To Tons Of Customers!
Jim Augustus Armstrong is The “Coach”
Jim Augustus Armstrong is the President of Flooring Success Systems, a program that equips dealers to double their profits, cut their work hours in half and beat the boxes! Many dealers have totally transformed their businesses and their lives for the better after joining Flooring Success Systems.
See what real, live dealers are saying!