Connect Social Networks Site

Duct Tape Transcript

John Jantsch (00:00): This episode of the duct tape marketing podcast is brought to you by the MarTech podcast, hosted by my friend, Ben Shapiro brought to you by the HubSpot podcast network with episodes, you can listen to an under 30 minutes. The MarTech podcast share stories from world-class marketers who use technology to generate growth and achieve business and career success. Recent episode, one of my favorite extending the lifetime value of your customer. You know, I love to talk about that. Listen to the MarTech podcast, wherever you get your podcasts.

John Jantsch (00:43): Hello, and welcome to another episode of the duct tape marketing podcast. This is John Jansen. I’m doing another solo show for you, regular listeners. You’ve probably caught a few shows on referrals. I’ve done three, I think so far. So you might want to go back and check out the show notes on those. If you want to get up to speed, I’m covering seven grades or seven strategies around how to generate more referrals. You can find the show at ducttape.me/podcast. The easiest way to catch up on all the shows. But those of you that are regular listeners probably caught the last three shows on this site. So I’m going to jump into another topic. I covered kind of how to stay top of mind with all of your clients, how to create a program specifically for what I call champion clients.

John Jantsch (01:32): Those folks that are, are already referring business to you. I introduced a, what I think is kind of a unique concept of creating a referral platform around your clients, other professionals that serve your clients. You might want to go really check that one out because it is a little bit unique. And then I spent some time the idea of internal referrals. So referrals from your employees, not only for customers, but for also for staff and team members as well. So today I’m going to get into a concept. I’ve talked about a lot, and that is the idea of creating a strategic partner network. Now, the net result of doing this is going to be, you’re going to generate a lot of referrals, but I think there’s also, well, well, first off, there’s a way to look at it. And that is you’re going to create this strategic partner network as an asset for your clients, for your customers, not simply as a way to get more referrals for people, the, the end result, the happy result of doing this is that you will probably get referrals, but it starts with a frame of mind that just says, what would it take?

John Jantsch (02:36): Or what would it look like if you built a network of best of class providers for pretty much everything else that your clients need, that you don’t provide. So, so that frame of mind of, of developing, or at least identifying people that when your client comes to you and says, Hey, I I’m really struggling with this challenge. Do you know anybody? You’d be able to say, yes, I actually work with an accountant or a lawyer or whatever it is that you might refer. And, and you, I think you make yourself more valuable to your clients, of course, but, but the net effect is you start actually having some relationships with some strategic partners who then feel a reciprocal obligation, but it starts with this idea of, you know, you’re not looking at just generating referrals, you’re looking at providing more service, more value to your clients.

John Jantsch (03:25): So the first step is to just identify, you know, who who’s out there, who are, what are noncompeting businesses that, that, that you either know by reputation or that people can tell you about. Or you can do research and find, and really identify who might make great strategic partners. And one little tip is, look at your existing clients, go, go ask your clients who they use, or who they respect or who they think are awesome businesses. In many cases, that’s a way to really identify and make kind of this strategic partner list, come to life for you because you, you will already have kind of a shared client. And so that might be one pretty easy to have a conversation with. Then there’s a practice of really kind of recruiting these folks. You know, a lot of times people will be very passive about this, or are certainly not intentional.

John Jantsch (04:11): And I’m suggesting that you actually reach out to groups or reach out to people that you’ve put on your list and give them a reason to, to actually know you exist to, to, and I’ll talk a little bit about exactly how we do that. You’re, you’re effectively recruiting them. If you want to think of it that way too, to be a strategic partner with you, then you you’ve, you’ve got to have a way to activate them. So what I mean by that is a lot of times people will say, oh, we should be working together. Yeah, we have this mutual client, or maybe they did work together one time and it’s like, yeah, we should do that again. But without a process or without somebody saying here’s how to do it, here’s a really easy way for us to continue to work together. A lot of times, those relationships just kind of fade.

John Jantsch (04:51): You might even take it as far as, as building a floor formal platform. And I, there are many, many ways that, that, that, that can come to life, that I would suggest that you, uh, I’ll cover a little bit here that, that you, you know, you, you don’t just leave this to, oh yeah. That’s a good idea. I should do that. I’ll keep my eyes up for that. Actually make this part of your overarching marketing strategy. I think frankly, for some businesses, this is, this can be the most potent strategy or approach that you can take. If you get in front of the right strategic partner and you start thinking about ways that you can work together, ways that you can add value ways that you can get in front of their audience. It may turn into hundreds and hundreds of introductions or leads or prospects with the right strategic partner.

John Jantsch (05:38): So it really, a lot of times when I’m, when people come to me and say, gosh, I’m just getting started my business, where should I start? What should I do to get some traction? A lot of times finding somebody who already has your ideal customer and figuring out a way to add value to them, you know, that that can be a really fast way and a very way to kind of jumpstart your marketing. So the first thing that I always have people do is if you’re going to go out to people and start explaining what it is that your business does, or, or maybe start talking about a referral relationship, there’s a, there’s a couple of things that you need to get clear on so that you can communicate these, um, you know, who is, I mean, how would I spot your ideal customer? If you think about somebody who says, Hey, I’d love to refer you to all my friends, neighbors, and colleagues.

John Jantsch (06:25): Um, you want to be able to tell them, well, here’s exactly who we work with. Here’s exactly how to present our core message. You know, here are some of the things that a prospect, a great prospect of ours might say that would give you a clue that they really need to get in touch with us if you have a referral offer. So for instance, if somebody refers business to you, you know, what do you do if somebody refers somebody to do, what’s your what’s even your marketing process so that you can confidently tell people, here’s how we’re going to follow up. Now you can take this as far as you like, but even if you just scribbled the, the, the answers to these questions on a pad, you’re going to be miles ahead. When you’re trying to have a conversation, and now let’s hear from a sponsor, do you wish you could get more traffic from Google, duh.

John Jantsch (07:13): I mean, but half the battle is understanding what to focus on, what you need to fix on your site. H refs webmaster tools will give you a professional website audit for free H refs will discover optimization opportunities for your website and help you get more organic traffic. You’ll see which keywords your pages are ranking for understand how Google sees your content and discover what changes you need to improve your visibility. Imagine the benefits to your business, visit H refs.com/awc to sign up for this free tool and connect it to your website. And you’re all set. That’s a H R E F s.com/awc. And you can also find this in our show notes. So, as I mentioned, you’ve created this list. Let’s say you have 10 or 12 potential strategic partners. Here’s the process that we’ve done thousands of times. And it is so effective at getting on people’s radar.

John Jantsch (08:12): Getting, getting good, useful conversation started is a process that we call the perfect introduction in reverse. So those questions that I told you, you know, how would I spot your ideal client? How do, how do we present our core message? You know, what our referral offer, you know, our marketing processes, creating those is a way to kind of introduce yourself as, as to somebody or at least introduce somebody who wanted to refer you. But if you want to recruit potential strategic partners, my suggestion is that you write them a note or a letter or an email, whatever form you want to do it, that essentially says, Hey, we have clients or customers that we believe could use your services. We’d love it. If you could teach us the best way to talk about you or refer you to our clients. Now, if you create this document that says, you know, how can I spot your ideal customer?

John Jantsch (09:05): Uh, how would you present? You know, your core message. What you can do now is go to somebody, basically say, look, tell us, you know, how we’d spot your ideal customer, tell us how you’d like us to best present you tell us, you know, maybe who, you know, if you have some testimonials or things that we can share with clients. So you’re essentially asking them to share the best way for them to, to, for you to introduce you to them, to their, to your customers. So most people will get that and, and respond, you know, pretty quickly too. I mean, you think about it. You’re basically saying we want to refer you. What it does is gives you the opportunity to have then a conversation about what you, what your business is, what your business does, how you could work together. And it don’t put anybody on that list.

John Jantsch (09:54): Don’t send this note or this a perfect introduction to anybody, unless you truly believe that you would refer them to your best customers. And that’s the idea behind this is, is it’s not just a way for you to go get more referrals. It’s a way for you to start establishing relationships with people who can become a valuable asset to your business. Now, once you have that connection, what I recommend is that you let’s say you’re going to meet a, that you actually have something in hand to say, okay, I would love to do a video interview with you. I would love to have you on my podcast. I would love to have you write a guest blog post. I would love to take a special offer that you might be able to make, and you’ll give it to our clients. Maybe there’s a way you could start talking about co-marketing together.

John Jantsch (10:44): Obviously, if you have some referrals to make, make them, if you can rate and review each other or provide testimonials, if you can become customers of theirs and then ultimately, so, so again, this approach of going into it with something tangible to say, here’s what I would like to do when we meet is going to get the relationship rolling. It’s not just going to be a conversation. Yeah. What are the next steps? I don’t know if it’s going to create a reason for you to start working together and start building a deeper relationship. At that point, you could start thinking about how could you create events together. Could you do a webinar for them? Could you talk about maybe having a couple of strategic partners meeting together and providing, say a half day of training or information and you would all invite people. So there’s just lots of ways that once you start this kind of down this path, it becomes very, I think in many ways, uh, you know, pretty clear the, the ways that you could start working together, if you just start thinking about it, that way you all need content, you all need, you know, extra things that, that, that, that make sense that, you know, for your own marketing.

John Jantsch (11:55): So it really can become an extremely potent way to develop partnerships from a co-marketing standpoint. You know, if you get a strategic partner, that makes sense. I mean, there, there are a lot of cases where they’re very logical extensions. You know, you think about the bridal industry, for example, I mean, there’s the florist, there’s a cake banker. There’s the, the invitations. I mean, there’s, there’s lots of sort of logical strategic partners that make sense. And you start getting ones that just go well together. One time I had a, an HPAC contractor, a painting contractor and electrical contractor, a lot of people who were fixing their homes up, just doing new, normal maintenance on their homes. You know, at some point in time, we’re going to need all three of those services. So what we cooked up was all every time their technicians or project managers would go in on site to do a job, they would actually pass out what were essentially gift certificates for the two other partners.

John Jantsch (12:54): So, you know, effectively, they were getting a sales call almost, um, you know, three times as many times. So, you know, think of things like that. And then obviously there’s some, some things that are just, they’re kind of fun ideas. One time we had a, a tax preparation business and when people would come in to bring in their things and start talking about their, you know, their taxes for the year, they, they actually had, they, they had hired a or partnered with a massage studio. And so people, you know, in a very stressful time, we’d come in and, and have, you know, this kind of nice treat. And obviously both, you know, the massage and the place was maybe going to pick up some regular customers. So it made a lot of sense for them. Now, one last that, that doesn’t often get talked about in kind of this partner, strategic partner idea is think in terms of developing a relationship with a, a nonprofit partner.

John Jantsch (13:47): Uh, obviously, I mean, in many businesses are supporting a nonprofit because they’re supporting their mission anyway, but maybe haven’t explored the ways to think about creating some sort of referral reward options. So let’s say that you are having a new product or a law, you know, something you’re launching, or maybe it’s a seasonal thing. You basically create a special bonus that says, Hey, for everyone purchased this month, we’re going to donate X to our nonprofit partner. Obviously that kind of thing. First off, people like it, it shows you’re involved in the community, but it also incentivize anybody who already has a relationship with that nonprofit to, you know, board members, volunteers, donors, you know, to, to actually consider your business as well. So lots and lots of ways that you can take this idea of strategic partnering. I really think for some businesses, particularly professional services, businesses where, you know, trust in is such a high, high, high need having that kind of trusted referral or, or strategic partner network.

John Jantsch (14:49): It can really be a great way to kind of take your, take your referral generation and your, your lead generation, quite frankly, to, to new Heights. So that’s it for today. I’ve got one more show on this topic of referrals. So if you have not caught the other three, and now of course this one, I’ll have another one coming up this week later as well. And you could put together, it’s basically the entire referral package. It’s like a book in five shows. So hopefully you’re enjoying it. I’d love to hear your feedback. Certainly check out the show notes at ducttape.me/podcast. All right. Take care out there.

John Jantsch (15:27): All right. So that wraps up another episode. I want to thank you so much for tuning in and, you know, we love those reviews and comments. And just generally tell me what you think also did you know that you could offer the duct tape marketing system, our system to your clients, and build a complete marketing consulting coaching business, or maybe level up an agency with some additional services. That’s right. Check out the duct tape marketing consultant network. You can find it at ducttapemarketing.com and just scroll down a little and find that offer our system to your client’s tab.

Scroll back to top

Sign up to receive email updates

Enter your name and email address below and I’ll send you periodic updates about the podcast.

Duct Tape Transcript

John Jantsch (00:00): This episode of the duct tape marketing podcast is brought to you by the MarTech podcast, hosted by my friend, Ben Shapiro brought to you by the HubSpot podcast network with episodes you can listen to in under 30 minutes, the MarTech podcast shares stories from world class marketers who use technology to generate growth and achieve BI and career success. Recent episode, one of my favorite extending the lifetime value of your customer. You know, I love to talk about that. Listen to the MarTech podcast, wherever you get your podcast.

John Jantsch (00:44): Hello, and welcome to another episode of the duct tape marketing podcast. This is John Jantsch, and I’m doing another solo show. We’re gonna talk about referrals. This is a wrap up. This is session number five of me covering the seven grades of referral fuel. If you haven’t caught the other shows, you can find them at ducttape.me/podcast In the show notes. Uh, we’ll link to all those shows. So you can kind of somehow put all five shows on referrals together. It kind of a, it equates almost to a masterclass on my thinking on the idea of referral generations. Hopefully you can check it out. Love to hear your feedback, love your and testimonials, uh, on the show. All right, this is, uh, number six of seven. So I’m gonna cover two of them today. This one, and, and actually both of these kind of are a little bit, they’re not out there, but they’re certainly not practice every day, but I think for the, the right business, the right person that really takes this and runs with it.

John Jantsch (01:41): So both of these ideas could be, be extremely, extremely potent. All right. So I did number six is to create your own expert networking club. Many folks are familiar with organizations like BNI, you know, where people get together and, and join a network of non-competing businesses. And they think about, uh, you know, generating referrals, uh, you know, from, from, and with each other. And those can be great for the right businesses. Those can be great organizations. The only problem is, is, you know, you’re joining something that’s already established. You really don’t know who’s there. Uh, you don’t get to pick , you know, who’s there. And so it’s a potent idea, but what, what if you could control it completely? And what I mean by that is what would stop you from creating your own event? That was a regular, whether you call it a club or whatever you call, it is something that, that people would come to.

John Jantsch (02:38): So it might be like a monthly breakfast that, you know, I’m in, I’m in the marketing space. So I might know, create something, the monthly marketing breakfast, and I would just invite people locally. You know, maybe they’d pay for breakfast, but they’d come and they’d hear for the price of breakfast. They’d hear, you know, some small business topic and it, you know, it doesn’t always have to be marketing in my case. Maybe I’d bring in some of my strategic partners. If you listen to last the, the last show on, on referrals, I talked extensively about strategic partners. So this would be a great opportunity for you to bring in those other professionals or folks that, that you work with and have them teach topics. So you’re not just doing all the heavy lifting, you’re really keeping it, really keeping it relevant, you know, keeping it, uh, potent for, you know, reason for people to come.

John Jantsch (03:25): Now, one example that that I’ve used actually in, in my book, the, the ultimate marketing engine was a woman who, you know, it doesn’t, here’s my point. It doesn’t have to be related to your business. If there, if there’s a topic or a reason to bring people together, that’s going to be a value to them. Uh, it doesn’t directly have to be related to your business. So the profile or the woman that I profile in my book, uh, actually was a real estate agent, but she was pretty good at marketing and learned a lot of these new, you know, digital tactics and things. And so she thought, well, I’ll just reach out to entrepreneurs and see if they want to have me and, and other folks that I work with talk about marketing topics. And so she brought in entrepreneurs and businesses and, uh, around this topic of, of generally around the topic of marketing and they would meet, you know, monthly for breakfast started very small.

John Jantsch (04:11): I think the last time, uh, I talked to her, it was around two, 300 people would come to this thing. Well, she was not selling real estate. She wasn’t talking out real estate, you know, is any of this, but she was clearly the one who benefited from, Hey, you know, I’m your host, you know, I’m bringing this together. Here’s the next ex expert I’m bringing to you. So consequently, almost all of her business came when somebody, you know, who was in this club needed to buy or sell a house, guess who they thought of. So it really can just be a for you to, uh, you know, to, to build some authority, to build some influence regardless of the industry, uh, that you’re in. Now. There’s a couple things that, that I think, make some sense on, if you’re gonna take this approach, you’re gonna have to commit to it.

John Jantsch (04:55): I mean, it’s something where you maybe go out and get, you know, your existing clients and the 10 of you, you know, meet for the first time and then you ask them to bring people. So it’s something that you’ll, you can’t just say, I’m gonna do this one day and, and have it just magically turn into this, uh, incredible thing. It’s gonna take an investment of time and energy and, and probably some resources in the beginning, but it could build to the point where it could be a significant revenue generator, uh, for your business. I think the people that have done this kind of thing, there’s another organization that I profiled the book called cadre, which is in the Washington, uh, DC area. And it was the same thing. It was a, a financial advisor who, you know, just got tired of going to the traditional networking things that everybody said you had to go do in order to, to, to meet people in that business.

John Jantsch (05:46): So he, he just started creating these monthly get togethers and he would bring in, you know, experts and authors and, you know, it was very, almost curated, you know, grew to the point where it actually is. It actually became, he actually sold his financial, uh, planning practice. And, and in is doing this full time now is, is running this kind of networking club that, you know, people are very, very engaged in as, as members of this. So, you know, it, it really, it it’s an idea that could be a very big idea, but even, even as a small size idea, I think it really can do a lot of very positive things for your business. Now, I know some of the, in addition, I mean, I think these things work probably the best when people can physically get together. But I think also creating some sort of platform in like meet up and, or event bright, or even LinkedIn and Facebook, you know, events and groups, you know, having something so people can kind of in between these, uh, get togethers communicate as well.

John Jantsch (06:42): But I think that, that, you know, creating that kind of thing, there are many, many businesses that that can benefit from that.

John Jantsch (06:48): This episode of the duct tape marketing podcast is brought to you by send in blue and all in one digital marketing platform, empowering small businesses to build store longer customer relationships through end to end digital marketing campaigns. They support businesses successfully navigating their digital presence in order to strengthen their customer relationships. Sendin blue allows you to create captivating and personalized email campaigns, custom landing pages, sign up forms, automated workflows, transac messaging, CRM, and more, and best of all, duct tape marketing listeners can click on sendinblue.com/ducttapemarketing to sign up for a free trial. And if you use the promo code on that page, duct tape, you’ll get 50% off for your first three months, either on a light or premium account.

John Jantsch (07:41): All right, the seventh idea is something I call a referral mastermind system. So the idea behind this, and this is, I think this can work for a lot of types of businesses, but any business that has clients businesses as clients, uh, I will have that caveat you’d need to be selling to businesses for this to work. One of the things that most of those businesses want is more business is more referrals now, regardless of what you do, obviously it’s very natural. I do. I’m a marketing consultant. So me going to, to clients and saying, let me teach you how to generate Earls for your business. I mean, that’s a very, very logical thing, but you don’t have to be, imagine that financial planner I talked about and they let’s say they were working with businesses or law firm, it doesn’t really matter. You’re working with businesses.

John Jantsch (08:33): Well, all of those businesses, yes, they want what you do for them, but they also want more business. And so what if you create created a kind of monthly referral training for your clients and, and this, and in effect, it’s not gonna really be this high level training in some ways, it’s, it’s really gonna be about you bringing them together to talk about and facilitate the, the idea of referral generation, right? In fact, you could do this in one, on one or, or certainly in groups, you could create some sort of compensation or point system where, you know, people are, you’re teaching a referral topic, but you’re teaching them a referral topic each month. You’re, you’re getting them together to talk about how to generate more referrals, or maybe just effectively talking about what they did that month to, to generate referrals. Maybe in some cases they would actually refer each other.

John Jantsch (09:26): In fact, in a lot of instances where if you’re B, if your clientele is primarily B2B, that’s probably going to happen, but ultimately what’s gonna happen is they’re going to refer business to you. You, if you, if you help somebody get more referrals, it is just sort of a, a human law of human nature. re recipro. I never can say that word reciprocity. There we go. You know, just happens. I mean, if you’re teaching somebody how to generate more referrals, they’re going to, to really reply and kind, and generally speaking, you know, you’re the financial planner or you’re the lawyer. Who’s actually not only doing the legal work that you are hired to do. You’re actually teaching them how to build their business. Who’s not gonna refer that business. Who’s not gonna want to bring people into your, you know, your referral mastermind group.

John Jantsch (10:16): So this is something that, you know, I just wanna plant the seed for this idea, but I, you know, this would be very easy. If you’ve already got a client base, this would be very easy to put together. You just create, you know, you just talk about it as almost a networking group or, you know, referral mastermind loosely. It’s gonna be about teaching referrals or facilit facilitating, uh, referrals. You can pick up a book or two on, on the idea of referrals. The ultimate marketing engine comes to mind. I wrote another book called the referral engine, you know, pick up either one of those books and you’ll have a whole curriculum for what to teach in your, you know, if you, if you take this idea and you know, you spend a few, your monthly meeting might look like you spending a, you know, few minutes meeting in greeting, then people just go around and share, Hey, here’s a success I had then maybe for 20 minutes, you teach a key lesson.

John Jantsch (11:05): Then a lot of times in mastermind groups, it’s very common to say, put somebody in a hot seat and say, well, here’s, you know, let’s talk about a challenge you’re having. And then obviously if there’s any way to share referrals in, you know, in, at, you know, or somebody can say, Hey, here’s a referral I’m looking for. I, I think just these won’t have to be that structured. I, I, I believe an experience that teaches me has taught me that, you know, just bringing people together with, even with a loose agenda is going to bear fruit. They’re going to find, uh, that valuable. So it’s, if that’s the case, it’s certainly gonna be worth the time that you invest in doing it. All right. So that’s my seven grades of referral fuel. Hopefully you’ve got some, uh, extra tips and ideas out of the, we’ll try to connect the whole series for you. There are actually five, this is number five of five. Hopefully you’ve had a chance to listen to the other four. If not, you can find them at ducttape.me/podcast. All right. Take care out there. And hopefully we’ll see you someday soon out there on the road.

John Jantsch (12:07): All right. That wraps up another episode of the duct tape marketing podcast. I wanna thank you so much for tuning in and feel free to share this show. Feel free to give us reviews. You know, we love those things. Also, did you know that we had created training, marketing training for your team? If you’ve got employees, if you’ve got a staff member that wants to learn a marketing system, how to install that marketing system in your business, check it out. It’s called the certified marketing manager program from duct tape marketing. You can find it at ducttapemarketing.com and just scroll down a little and find that tab that says training for your team.

Scroll back to top

Sign up to receive email updates

Enter your name and email address below and I’ll send you periodic updates about the podcast.