Leveraging Relationships

Hey, it’s Bob here, and in this blog post we’re going to continue to talk about leverage.  How to get more from everything you do; but now, we’re going to talk about leveraging relationships.  How do we leverage relationships?  How do we take a relationship that someone else has with someone you want as a customer – a hot prospect?

I’m just going to give you two examples of how to leverage other people’s relationships and turn their customers or their members into your customers. 

Example No. 1  Endorsed Mailing 
An endorsed mailing is when another business endorses your business to their customers.  Let me give you an example.  We have a client and a friend who has a fine restaurant in Utica, Michigan.  And he created several partnerships with other businesses in the area, and those businesses sent gift cards to his restaurant to their customers.

So let’s take a look at what happened.  His partners, the other businesses, they were winners; right?  Their customers thought that the business had actually purchased these gift cards and so they were thankful; they were happy.  It was a great piece of customer relationship building for the partner.

The partner’s customers won because they got a $20 gift card to a fine restaurant; so right, they were exposed to a fine restaurant, they got a nice discount on the first meal; it was good for them too.  So now we have two wins.  Who was the real winner here?  Filippa’s Wine Barrel, our friend, our client; why?  For very little money, they were bringing lots and lots of new customers, highly-qualified new customers into their restaurant.  You can use this anywhere, everywhere in your business. 

Just ask yourself what businesses do I share customers with? 

So let’s give an example.  If you were a pet store, a veterinarian clinic would be a perfect partner.  If you were a sewing center, maybe a craft store would be a local partner for you.  Think about it.  Your action item right now is get a piece a paper, write down all of the potential partners you have, and then start to make relationships.  Figure out how to get this endorsed mailing done. 

We had a client who had a garden center and generated $102,000 in sales from his very first endorsed mailing.  So an endorsed mailing is a great example of leveraging somebody else’s relationship with their customer to build your business. 

Example No. 2, Cause Marketing
Cause marketing is when you leverage a relationship that a nonprofit organization, a cause has with their members – not customers but members.  And there’s several ways to work cause marketing.  And if you have the Retail Mastery System, you know there’s a giant section on how to do cause marketing.  But here, all we’re really doing is talking conceptually.  

But imagine this.  So instead of another business sending out a gift certificate to your store, in this case a nonprofit sends out a gift certificate to your store.  When their members come in and shop, not only do their members save the amount of the gift certificate, but then, in addition, you donate a percentage of the sales generated by their members back to the cause. 

Now some of you are going, “Oh my gosh, I can’t give away the margin.”  But I want you to stop and think about it.  When you acquire a new customer, the money comes not from the first transaction, although that’s nice, the money comes from the relationship.  So you use a cause to get highly-qualified new prospects into your store.  You give them a great experience in your store.  And then you build the relationship and have all of those sales, all of those transactions, all of those visits to make the money on the back side.

So what I just described is essentially an endorsed mailing with a nonprofit.  Another way to leverage a relationship with nonprofits, a cause’s relationship, with their members is to have an After Hours Party.  My wife Susan did this and had an incredibly successful event.  She and her teammates in a walk to raise money for breast cancer, team Save Our Sister, partnered with our local running shoes store; and they had an After Hours Party – Paint the Town Pink.  And a certain percentage of all of the sales generated during this party were donated back to Susan and her teammates. 

Now, what happened?  Because they did it correctly, they had a huge party, a huge event.  The place was filled.  They got publicity – remember our last blog post because it was cause marketing because they were giving money away, they got a lot of publicity, they had a lot of people in the store, and Susan’s partner Running Circles got 400 new people into their store on their mailing list.

You see, you don’t have to sit around and wait for people to come into your store.  There are lots of ways to take your existing resources, your creativity, your passion, your energy and to leverage it into something significant.  So when you start thinking about, “How can I grow my business?  I don’t have very much money.  I don’t have a lot of time.  What can I do to make something happen?”  I want you to think about leveraging relationships. 

Find people who know the people you want in your store.  Find a way to build a relationship with them.  Find a way to leverage their relationships with their customers so that you can build your business.

From WhizBang! Training, this is Bob Negen