Growing Your Business by Building 'Network' Relationships
By Allan Pulga
Consider this scenario. A customer walks into your store.
You have two options:
1. Sell the customer a phone.
2. Sell the customer a phone and find out about him/her: the customer’s family, his/her job. Expand your business to sell phones to his family, his friends, and his co-workers.
As today’s cellular market nears saturation, you must find creative ways to do the latter: Grow your sales beyond the customer walking into your store. One way of doing that is by tapping into that customer’s social network.
Everybody has relationships. The customer who walked into your store likely has a significant other, or a spouse and kids who want wireless products too. This customer has a mother and a father, siblings, friends and co-workers that could become your customers.
But expanding your business into the customer’s network is easier said than done; it involves making an outstanding impression and carefully obtaining his/her personal information. Nobody would willingly divulge their personal and professional relationships without having good reason to do so. In order to obtain the associative information you want, you need a plan.
- Slyly get their information.
“Ever go into a restaurant and see that giant fish bowl begging for your business card to ‘Win a free lunch!’?” asks Al Lautenslager**, author of Guerilla Marketing in 30 Days and marketing coach at Entrepreneur.com. “If the restaurant is smart, they’ll take all the entrants, log them into a prospect database, and continue to market to them over and over.
“The real activity here is getting prospects that are interested in further conversation with you that’ll lead to purchases,” he adds.
- Offer them an incentive to share the information you need.
In sales, personal information is privileged. You need to give the customer something in exchange for that information. Customers can tell if you’re trying to get something out of them, so taking the right approach is important.
For example, when closing the sale at the till, instead of plainly asking, “What is your place of work?” lead into the question by showing the customer what he/she stands to gain: “We are having a promotion where we can offer you a 10 percent discount on this phone upgrade if you refer one of your co-workers to buy a phone upgrade from us.” Now you have the customer’s attention. Then ask, “May I ask you your place of work?”
- Actively pursue referrals.
“The biggest favor a customer can do for you (besides buy from you) is refer another paying customer to you,” says Lautenslager.
He encourages salespeople to take the initiative to ask for referrals, especially at the peak of a customer’s enthusiasm for the sale.
“You can’t ask a customer to think about everyone in the world that they might know. Ask them to narrow their universe when asking for referrals,” he says. For example, ask “Which of the people you play softball with would be interested in the same deal you’re getting?” And as with information, reward and provide incentives for referrals.
“My wife was ecstatic the other day when she received two tickets to the movies from her dentist for referring one of our neighbors to him,” notes Lautenslager. “Her immediate reaction was, ‘Who else can I refer to get more movie tickets?’ Rewarded behavior gets repeated.”
- Family plans sell.
Two in five (41 percent) U.S. adult mobile phone users currently have a family plan, and 97 per cent of these consumers say they never had a family member leave their plan, according to a recent survey by Harris Interactive research firm.
Harris Interactive predicts even more cellular subscribers will sign up for family plans, as 33 per cent of those not currently on a family plan say they will consider one when their contract expires.
“Wireless consumers clearly love family plans because they deliver great value,” says Joe Porus, vice-president and chief architect of Technology Research Practice at Harris Interactive.
- Be equipped with a method and mechanisms to quickly collect the information you need.
Nothing will discourage customers from divulging personal information than a long and tedious process. Make sure that your salespeople are trained to obtain the information politely and efficiently, using a step-by-step CRM system that is prompted at the point of sale.
The quicker you can enter a customer’s information into the system, the more convenient the process feels to him/her. And the easier it is for your salespeople to ask the right questions to find out what connections can be made – connections that lead to more sales and higher profits.