No B.S. Guide to Maximum Referrals and Customer Retention. Dan S. Kennedy

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       Across the Rubicon

      by Dan Kennedy

      A buyer is not yet a customer. A customer is not yet a committed customer. A committed customer is not yet an evangelical ambassador. But only evangelical ambassadors refer in any significant numbers, with any significant frequency.

      Somebody can attend your church regularly, yet never really engage with it, with various groups, with other parishioners. Somebody can attend and engage but never or hardly ever invite, let alone successfully invite others to attend. This person can be a satisfied customer or a happy customer or even a committed customer, but never cross the Rubicon to evangelist.

      A member of my mastermind/coaching groups I’ve gotten to know well, Nelson Searcy, is head pastor of The Journey churches as well as the director of Church Leader Insights, a nationwide support organization for pastors of growing congregations. Nelson freely admits that churches have several advantages over ordinary businesses in the securing of referrals—one of which is that evangelism is baked in. It is part and parcel of being a good Christian and a good church member. No comparable intertwined obligation comes with being the customer of your shoe store, restaurant, financial advisory practice, or software company. Still, he teaches pastors not to take this for granted. If they must convert the person to being an evangelical ambassador, we must do so as well. Presumption or sense of entitlement tied to excellence of goods or services has no place and no power.

      The first Rubicon a person gets across is purchasing. He may have hung around as a prospect for some time, reading your online or offline media, seeing your ads, being aware of and interested in you, receiving offers from you. Or he may have seen your sale of the century ad on Friday, and come in and made a purchase on Saturday. Either way, there is absolutely no assurance he will return again and again. All he did was buy something, and all you did is sell something. A transaction happened. A window of opportunity is created that will close quite quickly. Nothing more happened and nothing more should be presumed to have happened.

      It’s worth noting, hardly any businesses do anything about this. If I wander into a store at the mall and buy something, at best I get my email captured (and I personally don’t use email) and get dumped into a generic email marketing and “constant contact” system. Most of the time, even that minimum isn’t tried. But I can count on one hand the times I’ve gotten an actual, personalized thank-you card in the mail with any sort of bounce-back coupon. It occurred with a jewelry store and a rare book dealer last year. Nobody calls, asks if the thing fits or looked good when I got it home or if the dog likes her bed, etc.

      In short, follow-up to ensure satisfaction sucks. That pet goods store owner believes: Let sleeping or not-sleeping dogs lie. I guess they assume I’ll be back if I liked their shop and if the dog likes her bed.

      You want to be assertive and proactive in moving first-time buyer to customer to committed customer. To be a customer, they merely need to return and develop a habituated pattern of patronage. A good example of this was explained to me by a very clever entrepreneur in the dry cleaning business. His grand opening strategy was to aggressively buy habit. The first offer spread through the neighborhood was: Everything you can carry in here in your arms, bag, or box dry cleaned for $1.00. When they came back to pick up that cleaning, they got a ten-day offer to bring in coats, rugs, bedding, or drapes and get a bagful cleaned for just $5.00. These are irresistible offers. By the time the person picks up the second load, she’s been to this cleaner four times in under 20 days. He says her car then heads for that cleaner automatically if clothes are piled into its back seat. This turns a buyer into a customer by habit.

      The best way to have a committed customer is to have them paid forward or on autocharge, especially if there is pain of disconnect with the autocharge.

      In the 1980s, when I was very involved in the “prepay revolution” in chiropractic, I discovered two very important truths. You need to know that then, and now, most chiropractors charged by the visit, and by the treatment modality, as it was consumed. With prepay, the patient was prescribed a treatment plan like “three visits a week for three weeks, then two a week for four weeks, then one a week for five weeks, totaling 22 treatment sessions times $89.00 equals $1,958.00, plus one spinal decompression traction session a week for the 12 weeks times $240.00; $2,880.00; total $4,838.00” then asked to prepay that with a 5% savings or pay it in two monthly installments, right then, bing, bang, bingo.

      Here are the two truths that revealed themselves. First, the pay-as-they-went patients were miserably noncompliant. They skipped prescribed sessions, postponed at the last minute, didn’t do prescribed exercises at home, and more than half never completed their plans. Second, most did not refer at all or were only milked of one or two referrals early, if the office had a very aggressive approach—like a new СКАЧАТЬ