10 Strategies For Adding 10+ Referrals A Month (1 of 2)

Hello everyone. Welcome to the Magnetic Marketing Podcast. So excited that you are here today. We get to listen to Dan Kennedy and Bill Glazer as they talk about one of the main lead sources that you can get for your business. And it all comes through referrals. It's one of the most untapped potentials, and we're going to go through 4 reasons why we're not tapping it and you can, and how you can get 10 referrals a month additional to what you're doing already using 10 strategies. Now here's the thing, this is part 1 of 2. So that means we're gonna go over 3 of the strategies here and the remaining 7 strategies we're gonna discuss in episode 2. Let's get started.

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Welcome to the Magnetic Marketing Podcast with your host, Dan Kennedy. This is Bill Glazer. I'm joined by Dan Kennedy, and we're going to have— this is the first of a two part call, one half this month and the other half next month, speaking specifically about referral strategies. I will tell you that probably the quickest way to double your business is to get every one of your customers, patients, or clients to refer you one new patient, client, or customer, and you'll double your business. So we're going to be talking about that today. With that said, Dan, let's jump right into this first part of our call, which is the 4 reasons for untapped referral potential in any business. The first reason that you've identified is that it's taken for granted. Would you explain that?

Yeah, I think that a lot of businesses sort of take whatever referrals they get and are happy to have them. And aren't very sensitive to is it a good number or is it a bad number. In most cases they don't know what the number is. And so generally if you ask somebody, hey, how do you do at getting referrals? Generally you will get a response that says, well, we do pretty good. We get a lot of referrals.

Well, what's a lot?

Well, I don't know. And what's real good? I don't know. The fact that it happens is based on a presumption of, you know, if we do a good job and we treat people right, we'll get what there is to get and people who would refer to us will refer to us. And there's not a great deal more thought given to it than that. And in boom times, many businesses, that's— all well and good. In times like these when you really have got to pay attention to what's the stored value in my business, where's the unexploited value in my business, then being this casual about it, you know, is not so good. So, you know, the sort of taking for granted that we are doing well and that we're getting a good number without really knowing what that is, thinking about what would be a good number, measuring it, monitoring it, and so forth. That's the first reason you don't get more is because you accept whatever you're getting.

Well, you know, and I would suggest that if you feel as though you're getting a fair amount of referrals, accidentally or they're just happening, and most people believe they're getting them because they're delivering such superior products or services that people can't just wait to tell their friends, family members, and loved ones about this great experience I had with you. But if you're getting a decent amount of referrals, then if you do have a specific strategy that you put in place to actually then go get them, it's probably really easy pickings to get a multiple of what you're getting accidentally. So I think that's, you know, again, even if you're getting a bunch, you shouldn't be just satisfied with that. The other thing you mentioned, Dan, is which I think is really valuable, you know, as you know, at the super conference, kind of our theme is, you know, recession rescue strategies is a big theme of the whole super conference. You're doing— we've added an extra whole talk that you're doing about that. I'm certainly going to be doing a lot of— Showing examples of it and really during more challenging times, it really does suggest that you should be thinking about referrals now more so than ever before because it's one of the easiest customers to actually get to your business and also, you know, they're coming already ready to buy because of the credibility that's been established with the referring person. Let's move on to reason number 2, which is the erroneous belief that satisfaction equals referrals or they should equal referrals. Would you explain that?

Well, that links, of course, and again, as you said, most people think that they are earning the referrals through the delivery of their products and services. And doing a good job at that and that they are getting all that they earn by doing that. And both are bad assumptions. So first is this idea that satisfactory goods and services cause referrals. Actually, rarely does that occur. So you can be satisfied enough to continue as a customer with all sorts of businesses, but nowhere near motivated to, as you said, run out and tell your friends, relatives, neighbors, or business associates about that business. The gap between those two positions can be enormous. And so if you stop to think about it, we all have businesses that we continue to deal with, perhaps a neighborhood restaurant you go to frequently, your dry cleaners, maybe your barber, maybe where you buy your clothes, your property and casualty insurance guy, on and on and on. We have all sorts of people that we do business with, with whom we are satisfied enough to continue doing business with them or in some cases not dissatisfied enough to go through the agony of replacing them. But in most cases satisfied enough to continue doing business with them. And yet we certainly don't go out of our way to champion them to others. At best if somebody directly says,, hey, I just moved into the neighborhood, who do you get to clean your carpets? We may directly answer them by telling them about who we have clean our carpets, but we weren't at all ever going out of our way. We didn't make a point of saying, hey, I know you just moved into the neighborhood and at some point you're going to want to get your carpets cleaned and man, let me tell you about Bill because this is the guy you should have clean your carpets. We're not doing that. And so satisfaction is rarely enough to create passionate advocacy of champions. And the best reason for that is because whenever you and I refer a friend, relative, neighbor, business associate to somebody, we take a risk. We know if they have a disappointing experience, we're going to hear about it. The closer they are to us, the more vociferously we're going to hear about it. And in some cases, we're never going to stop hearing about it. So— and just about everybody's had the experience of, gee, we got a restaurant we go to all the time. We like it. Everything is great. The one time we take friends with us or send friends over there, the regular chef is out for the week with salmonella poisoning and the owner is on vacation and the regular waitress is home with bunions and the whole place is in disaster mode and it's a horror show. And so we have this reluctance. A very sensible reluctance to refer because of the responsibility upon us and the risk that comes with us. So it takes more than being satisfied to cause any of us to want to champion a business, to go out of our way to tell people about it. To be its advocate. It takes a lot more than just being satisfied. And if people actually— sort of looping back to reason 1, if people actually measured, even those who think they're doing well with this, if they measured, they in most cases will find out they're not getting a lot of referrals. And this is— Predominantly the reason why, because they're relying on simply satisfying customers or clients in order to get them. So like the stat I quoted in the report that I've used for years as a starting point is a famous automobile salesperson. His name is Joe Girard. And Joe holds the Guinness Book of World Records title for this. As America's greatest salesman, and his automobile sales career was almost entirely referral-driven. And Joe's rule of thumb was that everybody knows 52 people important enough to tell about a funeral or a wedding. Therefore, they know 52 people who they could tell about you. For most local businesses, I always cut it in half. I always said half of them live outside the area, half of them live in the area, so let's say the real number is 26, and in order not to have to remember a difficult number, let's say the real number is 25. So if you compare yourself to a car salesman, which generally are not held in high regard— my apologies to car salesmen on the call. Hey, at least you're not a lawyer. They are generally not held in high regard. So if a car sales guy can get 26 referrals per customer, and a guy I used to buy all my cars from, his working average was 32. If they can get that many and you are a chiropractor who is laying on the hands and healing them, you ought to be able to get that many. So now let's go take a look at your actual patient file. Let's go take a look at your list of regular customers in your restaurant, regular customers in your retail store, clients in your accounting practice, whatever, and let's go right down the list and let's see how many referrals this person has given you and how many referrals this person has given you and how many referrals this person has given you and A, I guarantee you it's nowhere near 26 or 25. And B, I can guarantee you that 90% of the business people don't track this at all. And so when they begin tracking, they immediately start to cure the take-it-for-granted problem. And then there's a whole micromanagement of it exercise that we can talk about or not talk about as you wish tied to this. But then— so they start to solve the misperception on their part that they're doing really well with this. And realize how much unexploited value there is. And then you can move to, well, why is that the case? Well, it's because we're relying on being satisfactory in order to get these referrals, and that's nowhere near enough effort in order to earn them and get them.

Well, I'll tell you an interesting story that really supports that is, you know, Dan, as you know and quite a few of our members know, Karen and I, we purchased last year a share in a pretty high-end travel program. And shortly after we joined, I started getting information about the financial stability of the company. Regularly sent to me. I happened to have a conversation by chance with the sales guy who was a spectacular sales guy, by the way, in selling this to me. As a matter of fact, during the sales presentation I had more questions about how he developed his sales skills than I did about the program itself. But he was telling me that he said, "Bill, the number one reason why we give so much data to our members as far as how strong the company is, is because we weren't getting enough referrals." A lot of people were— they were never mind joining this thing themselves, they were afraid to send their friends to this thing in fear that the company would go out of business. So we load them up now with information about the stability of the company and our referrals went up dramatically. So I think you are 100% right that people are often afraid to refer because of being embarrassed of sending people to something that they are going to look bad about.

Well, that's right. It's a phenomenal example. And it gets to thinking through what do we have to do besides satisfy this customer in order to get over this higher threshold to willingness to refer and then get all the way to the highest threshold of desire to refer. So he at least is doing something to address your willingness to refer. Now whether this whole thing has gotten to the point that you're like so thrilled and excited and passionate about it that you will go out of your way to refer is another question altogether.

Well, so let's move on to reason number 3 now. Again, we're in the category of the 4 reasons for untapped referral potential in any business. And reason number 3 you've identified is that The fear that you yourself or your business is so busy that you can't possibly continue to provide your products or services to more customers.

Yeah, this is one that a lot of people don't understand. And frankly, the more successful your business is or certainly the busier it is at peak times the bigger a danger this is. Yogi Berra's great line was, "Nobody goes to that restaurant anymore because it's too busy." And so if you only go to your favorite restaurant at times when it is packed and there's a waiting line for tables, your self-interest kicks in and you think to yourself, you know, if I bring a lot more customers in here, then all that's going to happen is the attention and time that the waiter can give to taking care of me and talking to me about the best wines that go with this and the quality of experience that I'm going to have when I come here is going to go down. "So it's actually in my best interest to shut up about this." Doctors have this a lot. Very common with chiropractors for Friday afternoon from 3 to 6 PM to be the busiest time because everybody wants to come in and get their adjustment before they go home for the weekend rather than back to work where stress will set back in and it'll undo the whole thing. Plus, it's a good excuse to leave work early. So Friday afternoon is like a good busy practice, successful practice Friday afternoon, they're hanging from hooks in the waiting room because the chairs are all full and the staff and the doctor are running from treatment room to treatment room and this is what you see. And if you never go there on Tuesday morning when everybody's sitting around reading magazines, you only see it at its busiest time and you assume it's always like that. And so in that scenario, in order to get referrals from people who haven't been referring, which your tracking tells you, it's a reasonable assumption, especially if you then note that they only come in at these peak times. So Helen's a— patient who's been healed in your accounting practice. Bill is a guy who you redid his taxes and rearranged his finances and saved him $100,000. I mean, whatever the case is, this person should be thrilled with you. They've been with you long enough to refer. They haven't referred. They aren't referring. And gee, they only see us at peak times. Well, that now tells you you've got to do something about that in one way, shape, or form.— what we always taught the chiropractors was the conversation, the direct conversation with the patient. Gee, Helen, I see in 4 months, even though when you came in here you couldn't walk and now you're afraid to stair instructor, we see that you haven't referred anybody and we also see and notice you only come in Friday afternoons when people are hanging from hooks in here. And so you may think, Helen, that we don't have any room for any new patients. And if you refer somebody, either I'm going to drop over dead with a heart attack or we're going to cut the time that we give you. And you need to know, Helen, that there are times of the week you don't see when you can throw a bowling ball through this place and not wound anybody. And in fact, we save time specifically for new patients referred to us by our good— etc., etc., etc. So you need to address it. And the same thing can occur in any business. It can occur in— an auto repair business. It can occur in a retail— it can occur in any business. And it is a reason that people don't refer is they view it as getting in their own way. And in B2B, both you and I have had this experience where a vendor is a really good vendor for us and then we refer enough business to that vendor that the vendor actually does become overwhelmed. And we find them taking better care of the people we have referred to them than taking care of us. And that sharply diminishes our desire to refer anybody else to them. So it's a very real factor. And it gets, you know, to the fact that this whole thing is— largely psychological. And so again, it's not just a matter of delivering satisfactory or even superior product services or results. It's more complex than that.

Well, we're having a really good call too. You reminded me of the vendor woes.

Sorry.

And right now I'm knee deep in the middle of one of the, the fumongas.

So— Well, I had Platinum calls all day today as you probably know. And I got an earful from one of our Platinum members about one of our vendors who we recommend often as well.

It's probably the same vendor, my guess. Probably.

Probably.

By the way, before we talk about the fourth reason, I just want to— this thinking about you're so busy. In your business and you can't take on more new referrals and more new customers, I just want to mention that this also can be very— the same problem can be very dangerous in other places in your business. So I mean, the example that you gave as far as the chiropractor who, you know, is so busy on Friday— I think you said Friday afternoons that they can't take on more people. It was interesting, I was doing a consulting call last week with a retailer from my BGS marketing days, and he was telling me that they stopped doing the regular system that they had in place to ring up sales in their store because of the fact that they're so busy at a certain time of day. For 3 hours is their busiest time, and they can't ring up the sales, but he also was telling me that that's— caused a tremendous amount of additional theft in his business by not properly ringing up the sales. So now the cashiers, there's nobody watching them, they can steal whatever they want. So it's the same problem is that people often say we're so busy, so they're not putting the things in place in their business that they need to do as opposed to figuring out, gee, now how do I still put the important things in place and overcome this not so busy thing. So it's now just more systems that you have to put in place in order to accomplish that. That's true with referrals and that's also true with other things. So let's talk about number 4. So again, just to remind everybody, we're talking about the 4 reasons for untapped referral potential in any business. And the 4th reason is out of sight, out of mind, which actually I think it's the number 1 of the 4 reasons, but Dan, if you would explain that please.

Yeah, because a business owner tends to eat, sleep, live, be focused on his business all the time. He sort of thinks that his good customers and clients are equally focused on his business and they aren't. He thinks that they know what I do. I don't need to tell them what I do and they know where I am so I don't need to tell them where I am. And they're happy. And so if they have an opportunity to refer somebody to me, they will and to store it. And maybe I send them an imprinted calendar or something. The year and I sent him an imprinted pen in July, so that ought to take care of it. People got a lot going on in their lives and they got a lot on their minds and they're not walking around thinking about their financial advisor. Well, these days they are, but not in a way that would stimulate a referral probably. But they're not walking around thinking about their insurance agent or the person who cuts their hair. Or the restaurant they go to or their clothing salesman minute by minute, hour by hour, day by day. As a matter of fact, in most cases they forget all about you until they need you and in many cases they have to strain to think about, "Now what was that guy's name again who works over there at Nordstrom's and where's his damn business card?" And who fixed this furnace the last time 7 months ago? And where's their doohickey? So they can't even find you to buy from you, let alone refer anybody to you and be alert for opportunities to refer to you. So if you are out of sight, out of mind, then these opportunities come and go and get missed on a day-to-day basis. The opposite of that, of course, is to be omnipresent, ever-present, so that you are in what I call a top-of-the-consciousness position and very small gaps of time go by between you reminding your customer or client of your relationship. And so most businesses, you know, just do not have the frequency, the constancy, the presence that is necessary to spark maximum referrals. To the contrary, they're pretty much invisible in between transactions and all the referrals slip through the cracks. Between the transactions.

Yeah, and listen, I just can't amplify that enough. I mean, people just make that mistake that they think that if you deliver such extraordinary products or services, people are going to run out and tell all their friends. And truth be told, you know, even if you can deliver that great experience, they just don't because there's just so busy in their lives, they are not thinking about you, they are thinking about themselves, which is really the work.

I used to tell speakers, and I proved it to two speakers on two occasions, those of us who speak professionally, most speakers sort of measure their impact and success by the afterglow of the standing ovation. And the people mobbing around them afterwards to touch their sleeve and tell them how great they were. And so I would always say to speakers, and how many of those people do you think can even remember your name 3 days later? So if they wanted to tell the meeting planner at the group they belong to or the vice president of their company about you that they could even tell them who you were. I used to get laughed at and I proved to 2 speakers on 2 different occasions literally by doing surveys that the vast majority of people in their audience 36 hours later couldn't remember their names. The cure for that in the speaking business, by the way, is to sell product. So that there's product around. So the guy has got books and CDs and courses and coffee mugs and stuff all over the place. So your name is— he can find it if he wants to. But it's simply illustrative of the fact that we think we have much greater impact than we do, and we think that we are on their minds much more than we are.

So we're going to move on to the 10 strategies to add 10 referrals a month, and strategy number 1 is creating a referral culture. So, Dan, I'll turn that over to you. What do you mean by referral culture?

An environment where everybody is very conscious and aware of it and so both customers and employees as well as the owner himself are very aware that what's supposed to happen here is customers are supposed to refer and in fact customers do refer. If there's a customer who's not referring, there's something wrong. And the customer should know if they're not referring there's something wrong because they see evidence and demonstration all around them that what customers do around here is refer. So that's the first part of it. The second part of it is frequent and constant measurement. Of referral productivity so that you can hold yourself accountable, you can hold your staff accountable, and you can hold customers and clients accountable. So all the way back to Helen in the chiropractic office, that's holding Helen accountable. That's being aware that of the 5 customers who I'm going to see today, 4 of them are referring, 1 of them isn't, and so I need to do something about the one who isn't. And of the 4 who are, 1 of them has been a superstar at referring, and I need to acknowledge and I need to encourage that. And so measurement is about what are our expectations, how many referrals are we supposed to get this week, this month, this quarter, this year, how many referrals are we supposed to get from each client and how soon in the relationship are we supposed to get them and how often are we supposed to get them and are in fact we getting them or aren't we getting them. So culturally this goes— this permeates everything. I mean it affects office or store decors and display. It affects staff training and staff meetings. It affects actual accounting, recordkeeping, statistics. It affects planned, if not scripted, at least planned conversations with customers and clients, awards, gifts, recognition, as well as from time to time special formalized referral from promotions. And so this is really about deciding that our business is going to be about referrals. And since it's about referrals, we're going to make sure everybody knows it's about referrals and we're going to hold ourselves accountable for a high level of productivity.

Well, you know, and you mentioned signs. And by the way, I want to give an illustration of that in just a second, but it kind of— when you were talking about it, it kind of reminded me going back to the program that you developed for wealth attraction and when you talked about there putting in certain wealth magnets where you're constantly reminded of wealth. And like, I don't know, is this still true that if you go into your kitchen and you open up your your drawer that holds your silverware, there's cash in that drawer to remind you of wealth.

Well, the drawer next to the silverware drawer is chock full of cash.

Okay. Cash drawer. Well, so if anybody breaks in there, they know exactly where to look.

Yep.

I've shown them a bunch of times. That's right. But my point is that's to create a culture of thinking about wealth, and the same thing holds true in referrals.

One of the—

when I think of it, you know, I've helped— many people know that I helped my brother-in-law who's a dentist with his dental practice to grow his dental practice. And one of our biggest strategies is referrals. And we do two major things with referrals. And one of them we'll get to on the second point here. But the first one is in every one of the— I believe it's called operatories where you actually do the procedure. There's a pretty significant sign there that is basically telling patients that, you know, one of the ways— and I'm paraphrasing here— but one of the ways that we— the office grows in order— is to help people just like them in order to refer their friends and family members to the practice. And again, I'm paraphrasing the exact language because the language is a little proprietary that we've developed.

But the—

so now when the patient is in the chair, the only thing they can look at is the sign kind of reminding them about referrals. But as importantly, my brother-in-law reports back to me that what that sign also did was it kind of reminds everybody who works in the office that this is— they're looking for referrals. So they're getting much more talking about referrals in the office since those signs have gone up. So it is an office that has a culture of referrals. The other example I'll mention of that, which is not about my brother-in-law, but the Royalty Rewards program that we're involved with, with Roy Fatt. Now this is an addition to the application process, and every time you get a new person to sign up for the loyalty program, on there there's a bonus— you get bonus points if you refer. So again, it's creating a culture where people are thinking about referrals and looking for every opportunity you can to remind people that you are, you know, in a referral environment. So let's move to number 2 on our list of 10 strategies is a patient— I'm sorry, not patient, a customer newsletter done right. So this is a— topic that's very near and dear to both you and I, Dan. We're both huge believers in customer newsletters, and we ourselves write and/or publish many newsletters ourselves. Everyone on this call is receiving several of those from us. So talk about— I guess we should remind everybody how important newsletters are for referrals, but also would you Can you explain this language of done right and how you do it right as opposed to not doing it right?

Well, this gets to the real asset value of the business, which it goes up dramatically when it's not customers but it's customer relationships. Under ideal circumstances, customers believe, have a sense of, have the experience of being in a real relationship with the business owner and in many cases the staff persons of the business. Certainly in professional practices that's true. And so that's facilitated, it's an outdated term now, but that's facilitated in part by them being pen pals. And that's the kind of thing that gets sent, you send to somebody you have relationship with. A prefab off-the-shelf commercially prepared newsletter that has article content in it but has none of that now is infinitely better than doing nothing because it at least addresses or it is a component part of addressing out of sight, out of mind. But it is not Aunt Martha's Christmas letter in any way, stretch, or form. And done right, a really good customer newsletter has elements in it that are Aunt Martha's Christmas letter. Those elements are often viewed by people who don't understand this as hokey or irrelevant. Why would customers of my optical store care about my Uncle Harvey falling off the roof and my dog? I'm right now finishing work on a whole presentation of pets in marketing examples that has to come to you to be stuck up on the website in case you weren't paying attention for our members. And members sent in a lot of examples. And again and again and again, people expressed in their notes when they sent it to me that, you know, they started to kind of use their pet and talking about their pet often in their newsletters as well as in their marketing materials and were astounded at the response that came from customers and in some cases from prospects about this. And it's not astounding to me at all. So first of all, the newsletter in and of itself has enormous value because in stimulating— specific to stimulating referrals, but also in customer retention and permission and opportunity to promote new products and services and offers and so forth, because it imposes a discipline on you. It forces you to be consistent because by its nature it's a publication and under ideal circumstances it is a monthly publication. Hitting the bricks literally the same week if not the same day every single month so that people begin to expect it just like they expect their monthly copy of Time Magazine or whatever else they subscribe to. And they don't view it as just another piece of junk mail but in fact they view it as a publication that they look forward to getting and want to receive. And you know you got that right if you skip one and people start calling up at your sewing shop wanting to know where your newsletter is. And you know you don't have it right if that never occurs, if you want to run a test. But so it has enormous value even done poorly or done with off-the-shelf stuff. But it really has value when somebody, and often again involving their staff, will take take the time to craft it lovingly and personally and incorporate their own stories, their philosophies, their experiences, their Aunt Martha's favorite recipe of the season, on and on. These things I've yet to see anything as powerful as a component part in stimulating maximum referrals in 30 years as this when it is done right.

Yeah, let me ask you a question about that. What would your take on how far you can push that envelope in terms of— how overt you can be about asking people for referrals or do you want to be subliminal about it or is there a time or are you usually subliminal and then every now and then you notch out one of the months or two of the months a year in your newsletter when you're more overt? What is your thinking about that?

I would support the last. Has best, but my real answer would be all of the above. I think there's a lot of stealth. When you put together your newsletter, you have opportunities, all sorts of opportunities to, if not subliminally, to gently keep putting in their face The fact that what people do around here is refer and we really like it when they refer. Your opportunities to do that are to dispense recognition only to customers who refer and just mention, oh, by the way, so here's our customer of the month, Billy Bob, and here's all about how Billy Bob used our product. Our carbon dioxide detector in his house to save his family. And oh, by the way, Billy Bob referred 4 new customers this month. And of course, if every customer of the month has that mentioned about them somewhere, everybody but the real dim bulbs, like, gets it after a while. You have opportunities. Some very common is the list of new customers, new clients, new patients, and next to their names the lists of the customers who referred them. And so that's there all the time. And so I wouldn't go so far as to call it subliminal, but it is actually an extension of the culture of referral expressed in this media. Then to your last point, every once in a while— well, actually, first of all, you can have institutionalized as well incentives and reward and recognition for referral if you wish. A very common thing that we we've always done with practices is the patient of the month who— there's a criteria for being patient of the month which includes compliance, getting well, getting great results, keeping all your appointments on time, and referring. And the patient of the month may get dinner out or they may get a customized experience based on what they like. So you might get Baltimore Ravens game tickets and somebody else might go to the museum and that's all written up in the newsletter every month. So that could be like institutionalized and then every once in a while, several times a year at least, you run some kind of very specific referral promotion perhaps tied to a charity, whatever, that is blatantly advertised in the newsletter as well as everywhere else, and it provides a platform for doing that. But one of the things to think about it— well, the two main things to think about it are one, to think about it as glue, as the foundation for all of your communications that sustain the relationship with the customer and sort of hold the whole thing together. And the other is that it's all about continually stimulating and reminding and encouraging referrals. And so when you sit down to build it every month, it's like, how are the different ways this month— how does this person's story, how does this example— how can we use this to keep reminding people that what customers do around here is refer., and we really like it when they do.

Yeah. I think the Baltimore Ravens tickets would be a really great reward for referring in Baltimore. I thought like in Cleveland, maybe if you don't refer, you get Cleveland Browns tickets.

Yeah, yeah. The fewer you refer, the more games you have to go to. That's the way you use your skybox here.

Number 3 on this list of 10 strategies to add 10 referrals a month, and the kind of— in many ways it links to the previous one of having a customer newsletter is to have just more frequent customer communication, which is again something that we certainly teach at Glazer Kennedy. And it was one of the big, big triggers for a jump in my business. My previous life of being a retailer was all the substantial amount of more customer communication. So talk about that, Dan, give some examples, but my assumption is a lot of the same thinking that goes into the newsletter.

Yeah, I mean, first of all, my two operating premises are number one, you can't over-communicate unless you're boring or otherwise unwelcome.— but otherwise you can't over-communicate. You can't show up too often. And conversely, almost everybody either through quote-unquote being too busy or being lazy or being unimaginative or being cheap communicates far too little. And so competitive advantage also comes along with being the person who communicates a lot and communicates frequently rather than communicates a little and infrequently. And so this is really about creating a plan appropriate for your business. For an amount of communication during a calendar year and a frequency, a predetermined frequency, whether that's once a week or once every other day or once a day or once an hour, a frequency, and then much like you teach them to build a marketing calendar for the year, you build this customer communication program for the year and you stick to it. And there's obvious things that just about everybody can do, a birthday, anniversary, Thanksgiving, you know, some seasonal reference, that sort of thing. And that now takes care of a certain number and then you've got to figure out what all the rest of the things are that you are going to do. And this, by the way, is in addition to overt and direct solo promotions. So if you think your frequency should be once a month, which I would say is not frequent at all, but for a conversational example, if you think your frequency of communication with your customers should be once a month and you run a big sale every other month, you can't count the promotion of the sale as 6 of those 12 communications. This is about other communication.

This is really about relationship, not about transaction. And clearly there's no reason today to be thinking about limited to 12 times a year communication with the internet in place. I mean, you know, in my menswear stores, we were sending every one of our customers a weekly dress for success tip, which was— which as you said, Dan, was all about relationship. Very seldom was there ever any kind of an offer that was in those communications. It was all about just being the place where people come to shop for their menswear. So it's easy to do it. I also want to caution everybody by giving out that example of sending out an email each week was don't rely— the most dangerous thing to do is just rely solely on email. So email to me is a supplement or a component part of communication.

Well, here's a couple of good questions from people. One is, How frequently do they need to have some sort of communication with their spouse in order to stay married? And if they can get by with once a month, more power to them. And secondly, how often do they need to have some sort of real and meaningful communication with their kids? In order for them to have any sense of what's going on in the kids' lives and for the kids to have some sense that they actually have a parent who cares about them? Third, how frequently do you need to have meaningful communication with your dog before it growls at you when you arrive at home? And the answer to all three of those questions, you know, is is measured in days at best. It is certainly not answered in weeks or months or sporadically. And we're really talking about exactly the same thing here. How often do you need to communicate with somebody in order to maintain and have them believe that they are in a meaningful relationship?

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