How to Build Trust and Generate Customer Referrals

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As a business owner, you know that your best leads often come from referrals from previous customers putting their friends on to you. But how are you consistently turning your everyday customer into sources for referrals and customers for your business?

In this week’s episode of Cracking the Code, Contractor University faculty member Drew Cameron explains how to build a dedicated customer base for your business that will generate more referrals and help you grow.

Audio Transcription (in Beta)

Hey, everybody. Join us on today’s cracking the code and learn how to get your marketing efforts synchronized.

Okay. Let’s get started with today’s show this week. We have the lovely and talented Mr. Drew Cameron talking about marketing synchronicity. Take it away, Drew. Hi, I’m Drew Cameron with EJA Contractor University, and welcome to this edition of Marketing Mastermind 360. Today, we’re going to talk about marketing synchronicity.

So let’s go ahead and get to the slide deck. We thought about marketing synchronicity. What we’re talking about is. The idea that we have to put marketing out in front of people who may or may not be aware of us. And in reality, when you put a message out there, it may come across to people as the fact is that you exist, but so what and who cares.

And so you need to get your message to sync with people so that they, they do care that they care about who you are and care about what you do and care about what you stand for and how you do it. In addition to that, marketing and advertising creates awareness. And so we need to create awareness amongst people who may not be aware of us.

They may be aware of our brand, they may be aware of our truck, but they may not be aware of what we do and all the things that we do. So advertising creates awareness. Marketing then creates interest. So we go from, you know, basically being ignorant in some people’s mind or oblivious, uh, in some people’s minds to an awareness.

to an interest. And from interest, sales and service, if you will, creates customers and revenues, meaning they convert the people who get interested in us and our brands and our products to business, right? To becoming customers and creating that revenue and then the people processes and customer experiences create happy customers because ultimately that’s what we want, right?

But that comes down to you, your people, your processes and the customer experiences that you create. From there, customer care creates clients, reviews, referrals, and repeatable revenue streams. And ultimately, that’s really what it is that we want. We don’t want just transactions, we want to be transformational where we’re getting business on an ongoing basis.

And that’s what customer care does. Customer service is what you do, customer care is how you make people feel. And as Maya Angelou said at one point, people will forget what you said, and people will forget what you did, but they’ll never forget how you made them feel. And so customer care is really where we have to focus on today to create those experiences that get people to return to us and actually rave about us.

Ultimately, if you really think about it, the goal is to move from an anonymous entity to awareness, to interest, to advisor, to preference, to customer conversion, to client, to raving fan, to ambassador for life. Basically, we’re talking about moving people into club levels, providing loyalty benefits, referral rewards, and inviting people to special events.

Most contractors don’t even have special events that they invite their customers to. But people want to be part of a community nowadays, and they want to connect with the people that they do business with. And so I think we have to, as contractors, start to consider having special events where we invite people to open houses and, and product, uh, demonstrations and, and, uh, other informational things and, um, And other celebrations where we’re celebrating the customers as well as, you know, our time in business.

In addition to that membership, people will pay for membership. They will pay for access. They will pay for benefits, scarcity, exclusivity. Um, and that is what ultimately creates ambassadors. And what I’m talking about when I talk about an ambassador, it’s a client who repeats us and uses us for business, but also will refer us not only if asked, but we’ll be out there, you megaphone preaching about us, talking about us unsolicited.

because they are such a raving fan, and that’s ultimately what it is that we want. This is the foundation of what I call my trusted authority approach, and it’s a process in which we as contractors have to climb the ladder, and I go into great detail in this in the sales execution workshop as well as the elevated consumer buying experience workshops, so I invite you to join me for those, but the trusted authority approach is basically a process in which the objective is getting mutually beneficial results.

And happiness, meaning I want the customer to be happy and get a good, good outcome. And I want the company to be happy and get a good outcome. And I want the people on the team to be happy and have a good outcomes. And the way we do that is realize that we start out in most cases as an, as an anonymous entity to most of the people who contact us for our products and services.

And that transitions basically reveals itself, I should say. as ignorance, meaning they’re ignorant to us, they’re oblivious to us, they’re not a, you know, they’re not even aware of us. From there, we move to a known resource. Somehow they hear about us, and they become aware of us, and that creates awareness, and that awareness then, if, if it’s intriguing enough to people, gets them to think about utilizing us.

And possibly contacting us, meaning we’re worthy of consideration because they are intrigued by us. And if you think about that, that’s the breaking point, right? That’s where we transition from what happens before we get phone calls and web forms being filled out to where it transitions and they actually invited us out.

And they’ve invited us out because they consider us, based on what they’ve heard about us or what they’ve read about us, to be what is known as a trusted authority. And they have interest in possibly hearing what it is that we have to say. That interest, if trusted enough, turns you into a trusted advisor.

And that’s really what it is that you want to be. The problem is, if you don’t think you’re, or know that you’re not a trusted advisor going in the door and you assume that you are, you could violate the position of trust with the customer. But once you establish yourself as a technician, uh, as an installer or as a salesperson, uh, in the home as a trusted advisor, then they will listen to what you have to say.

They have a desire to hear what you have to say, meaning on occasion they may invite three to five or six people out to their house to give them quotes. But not everybody qualifies. See, everybody qualified is a worthy consideration. Everybody qualified is a trusted authority, but some people didn’t migrate past that.

And so, some of the six get discounted and don’t get listened to. They, they, they throw them out and say, I’m not even going to call them back. I’m not even going to talk to them. And sometimes the contractor doesn’t even show up and follow up. And therefore, they’re discounted and, um, not, uh, no longer considered.

But when you move to the trusted advisor, you’re one of maybe one or two people that they will listen to to hear what you have to say to take into consideration what it is that they should do. And then whoever is the most trusted advisor earns the business and becomes the trusted provider. The trusted provider is basically someone who has made a connection with a customer and they decide to take action because they’ve been moved emotionally to do something about their life story.

Something resonated with you and your company, your products and services that connected with them and their story. And they said, listen, I want to do business with these people regardless of price, because I trust them. And at the very end of the day, doing business with somebody is a very human connection.

Based on a very human connection. And it’s all based on trust and respect. They don’t even have to like you, but they do have to trust and respect you. And that’s where the transaction takes place. That first transaction is when you are a trusted provider. But that’s not the ultimate goal. We don’t want to become the trusted partner, where they do business with us on an ongoing basis because we made an impression and they’re a raving fan.

They’ll give us a great review and they’ll use us again. Meaning, maybe they become obviously under warranty or they’re under service, uh, agreement with us. And so that’s a trusted partner, but that’s not the ultimate goal. The ultimate goal is the top of the mountain, where this person isn’t just raving about you when asked.

They are a trusted emissary or ambassador. They’re an evangelist. It’s no longer about us, it’s about them at the highest level, and they’re talking about us. And not only are they raving about us, they’re promoting us. And when you look at this framework, what you realize is below the line is where marketing advertising place takes place.

And above the line is where operations, sales and services taking place. And so we want to focus on this bottom portion when we’re talking about syncing up or marketing synchronicity and syncing up our message to make sure that we get the phone call, we get the web form so that we get in the door. And that’s what we’re talking about with marketing synchronicity.

So in addition to that, you must also connect several elements for your marketing to be effective. You have to consider the, you know, your zone adjustment. When you attend the marketing mastermind, you hear me talk about, you have to adjust for the zone, meaning the area of the country that you’re in based on the weather patterns for your area of the country.

That’s going to determine the timing and the message that That you’re going to be putting out there. And so it determines the, the, the timing of the message. As far as the seasonal strategy, it takes into consideration, whether and events that might be happening, uh, time of year, seasons, holidays, and so forth, uh, departmental strategy.

So you have many departments within your company. You may have service maintenance and install, but some of you may have indoor air quality, electrical, plumbing, solar, and so on. You have to think about who is your target market. Meeting the audience. Who are you going after? Who do you want this message to resonate with?

You can’t basically say it’s everybody within a certain radius of your business because that’s not true. That everybody within 30 miles of your business is not your target market. You have to pick the geodemography of these people and make sure that your message resonates with that certain geodemography.

The media, what media, uh, types are you going to use, whether it be radio, television, uh, over the top streaming, direct mail, billboard, web, uh, digital assets and so forth. You gotta take into consideration where is the message going to show up and how is it going to show up and when is it going to show up.

What is the message? That includes your offer and the call to action. And you gotta make sure that that’s compelling. It can’t be about you and your company. It has to be about the people, meaning your customers and their problems and the life impacts that they, you know, that they, your products and services make that they desire, the experiences that they desire, the new life that they desire, because that’s what they want.

They want to be transported from where they are today to some new existence, right? Life has been what it is. For all these years, up until this moment, I called somebody because I want a new life. And you have to make sure that your messaging talks to me about me and my life, not about you and your company and your products and services.

Okay, that comes at a later time. Guerrilla marketing. Okay, this is where we take into consideration no cost to low cost strategies. And they’re not outside the box ideas. These are just no box ideas. Meaning I want you to have a blue sky, a white piece of paper, Right? I don’t want any constraints of any existing thinking.

I want you to kind of think about what’s possible. What’s the most extraordinary things that you can do? If time, money, and industry thinking weren’t limitations, what could you do? What would you do? I also want you to think about having some, uh, contingency plans. Sometimes the weather doesn’t cooperate, uh, cooperate.

Sometimes the economy doesn’t cooperate. Cooperate. Sometimes a marketing piece that you put out into the marketing, uh, into the marketing, excuse me, does not cooperate and get you the results that you want. So you have to have some contingency plans in pace in place so that, um, you can act fast if you need to, you need to be able to pivot on a dime and you can’t, you know, wait and say, Oh, that didn’t, that letter didn’t work.

And now all of a sudden we’re going to have a bad month, month and a half. And, and we’re going to be sending people home. We’re not going to have enough work for the team and that’s never a good, uh, good business strategy. We obviously take into consideration the investment. Okay, the investment and what it’s going to pay back.

You’ve got to think about this in terms of your budget, yes, but could you make an investment that you hadn’t planned for in your budget and create enough extra business that that investment gets paid for by that new influx of business that you created. So consideration, uh, consider the investment. And then you also have to track, you got to track your marketing.

You know, it’s one of those things that if you ask people how they heard about you or why they called you, they’ll give you a bunch of different answers in many cases. A lot of them will tell you that they got your name off the internet or off, you know, a billboard or off of a truck or something like that.

And that may be where they got the information to call you today, but what’s the real reason that they got a hold of you? And when you think about it, yes, I want you to put codes and tracking phone numbers into your ads, So that you can track them to the best of your ability. But what you’re going to have to come to realize is that you’re never really going to understand what marketing vehicles pay for themselves truly.

Because everything works together to create a message and an image and a brand expectation and a brand promise in the customer’s mind. Okay, one thing ultimately pushed them over the edge, but it’s the combination and the culmination of everything together that ultimately led to them reaching out and contacting you.

The thing you also have to take into consideration when you think about marketing is making sure that your marketing syncs up with your call taking, and then of course syncs up with sales, which is sales is, uh, your customer service representatives going out there, meaning your technicians as well as your sales people.

And understand, uh, That when we talk about marketing, and it’s not just marketing, it’s how we learn and how we remember things. We, we tend to learn and remember 10 of 10 percent of what we read. This is also great for training technicians and salespeople, by the way. Uh, as well as anybody for that matter, uh, including students, your own children.

We remember 10%, uh, roughly about 10 percent of what it is that we read about 20 percent of what we hear, 30 percent of what we see. 50 percent of what we see in here, 70 percent of what we discussed, 80 percent of what we experienced and 95 percent of what we teach each other, right? And so the way we get better is together.

And, and so you just shouldn’t give people something to read or something to listen to, or something to watch, uh, when it comes to training, nor should you do that in essence. If you really think about it, you’re training the market to be intrigued and interested and take action on contacting you about your products and services.

And so that, that educational framework, if you will, that escalates from 10 percent to 95 percent is what it is that we want to do. And hence, like I said, having open houses where you invite the public to come out and interact with you. You go out, get out into the community and meet with people, right?

Because again, we’re going to resonate and our message is going to resonate with people. And so lastly, when we talk about marketing synchronicity, marketing budget, your, uh, marketing budget KPIs. Now in the marketing, uh, mastermind 360 platform, educational content that I’ve already provided, there is a video on marketing profiles, if you will.

And that’s where I discuss, uh, how you can budget, uh, and your, your, Personality, if you will, you’re assuming how you can budget your marketing based on your marketing persona, whether you be conservative, moderate, or aggressive based on your, you know, your growth and what you wanted is what you want to accomplish.

Now, Gary goes into great detail with spreadsheets and whatnot when he does the marketing boot camp as well as the success week boot camps. And so I highly suggest that you attend those or uh, Uh, watch that video on, uh, video content online in the library. But in addition to that, what I want to do is I want to call your attention to those marketing profiles that I provide, because again, if you don’t have all the data like Gary needs for the spreadsheets, those profiles will be a quick way to just look at and say, Hey, this is what I want to do and what I want to accomplish.

The one piece that was missing in there though, was The piece that’s based on the fact that marketing is what supplements operations, meaning marketing and advertising supplements operations, because our existing operations create opportunity and that opportunity is what we’re going to take advantage of to hit our budgetary numbers.

But whatever our existing base will give us. is, is basically a limitation on what it is that we can achieve. And so we have to take into consideration, as Gary talks about, in the, uh, marketing platform, that how many service agreements do we have? Residential service agreements, and that’s what I’m focusing on here.

So, how many residential service agreements, meaning the number of service agreements that you have, per million dollars of residential revenue. So when I take into consideration service, maintenance, indoor air quality, uh, residential replacement, and anything else, plumbing, electrical, anything that you do residentially, I add up all that revenue, and I add up all the service agreements, and I basically say, how many agreements do I have per million?

All right. And so the guideline is to get to a 3 percent marketing budget is that Gary says you need to have somewhere between 1, 500 and as low as a thousand. Obviously more is better. If you can go over 1, 500, that’s great. The challenge is for most contractors and that just doesn’t happen in the industry unless you’re really good at promoting this.

Most contractors are not because most contractors are not good at marketing and creating opportunity for service calls as well as maintenance calls. So we have to kind of take a deeper dive onto this. So what I have found over time, uh, through my, my travels and, and working with contractors, if the contractor has anywhere between a thousand and seven hundred and fifty service agreements per million dollars worth of revenue, they’re probably gonna have to spend more like, 7 percent or at least budget more like 5 percent to 7 percent of revenues towards marketing.

And again, when you’re budgeting, you’re budgeting for what it is that you want to be. If I did 3 million last year and I want to do 5 million this year, this percentage is based on the business that I want to do, not the business that I did do a year ago. Okay. That’s where you’re getting your KPI for this or the metric to consider this, but the budget is going to be the percentage of the goal in the budget.

Next is basically if I’m going to be somewhere between 750 down to 500 agreements per million, customers, uh, contractors are gonna have to invest probably somewhere between 8 and 10 percent for marketing. Because again, you just don’t have enough opportunity coming out of your base probably, uh, you know, to fuel your growth objectives.

And lastly, if you have under 500 agreements, you’re probably gonna have to spend somewhere between 11 and 15 percent of revenue. Uh, so that’s less than 500 service agreements per million dollars worth of business. That’s going to be a big spend, 11 to 15%. But the cool thing about this is, and again, if you attend a success week bootcamp with Gary and myself, we’re going to teach you how to build this in to your budget.

So the customer pays for it all. You don’t have to pay for any of it. And so with that being said, we got to make sure, uh, that our marketing is in sync, hence marketing synchronicity as a member. You are the mission. If you have any questions about any of this or any other aspect of your marketing, make sure you tune in on a monthly basis to the Marketing Mastermind 360, or feel free to reach out and contact me free of charge.

Happy to have the conversation as a member, you are the mission and I’m happy to serve.

Well, thank you, Mr. Drew Cameron. We appreciate that amazing advice as always. Now, listen, be sure and share this on Facebook. And if you’re not a member, I want you to click the link and sign up for a free trial. It’s a 30 day free trial. You get access to all of our content. And I guarantee you, if you follow the advice, if you take the courses, you will take your company to new places, new amounts of success.

Well, that’s our show for this week, guys. We’ll see you next time until then. Bye bye for now.