One of the first things I do with new mentees is understand precisely where their customers come from.
And for most of them who aren’t marketing whizz’s, their business is almost exclusively grown from word-of-mouth referrals.
But, when I ask them what active strategies they use to promote referrals, I’m usually met with a blank stare.
This is no slight on them at all — at the end of the day, no one talks about this stuff, so I tell them they should never be disappointed since you can’t know what you don’t know.
Here’s what I tell them:
“When you develop active referral strategies, you can create a virtually unlimited sales force that does a lot of the ‘selling’ for you, because referrals borrow trust from one person to another. It’s much easier to sell your services to a prospect who trusts you via proxy.”
So usually, I’ll share what I do at AA with my mentees to actively encourage referrals through all sorts of incentives and bonuses and how we find the essential inflection points in time where they’re primed to receive a request for referral positively.
This is critical because if you time it wrong, your request could land on deaf ears (hint: it has much to do with reciprocity, which I spoke about a few days ago).
Anyway, I was reflecting on this and realised that while AA (the gyms) has an active referral system that I’d built and optimised over time (can continue to optimise further still), I was not following my own advice for the education side of our business.
Because a lot of you wouldn’t know (or at least it’s been so long between mentions that you’ve forgotten about it), that we offer a $500 industry referral for anyone in our circle who refers a friend, family or client to our PT course.
And since you’re already probably thinking there is a catch… well, there isn’t.
You refer via an email introduction, they enrol, and you get paid. Here’s a screenshot of just how easy the process was:
And given that you were probably going to do this for free anyway (assuming you want the people near and dear to you to get the best PT education possible), it’s a free win.
Since we have an intake launching in ~4 weeks, there is a limited window left before enrolments close for another 6 months.
So, if you’ve had conversations in the past with clients who are looking to get qualified, or, have someone in mind who’s already on the hunt, feel free to join the industry referral program, introduce us, and reap not only the benefit of knowing they’re getting well looked after but, you’re getting a juicy thank you gift for doing nothing much at all.
Here is the link to join the referral program:
It takes about 6 seconds to register. Just click, input your name and email, and we’ll send you an automated email with all the info that walks you through how it all works.
– Karl Goodman
