Webinar Replay: Referral Success Blueprint: 5 Simple Steps to Your Most Profitable Leads

All right, everybody, welcome, welcome, welcome. I'll open the chat. Yes, okay, cool. So, um, years back, um, way back, 2011, I created this, um, Referral Success, uh, Blueprint, and, um We recently, in the last month or two, just updated it to 2020. And so at the end of this, if you guys want a copy of the blueprint, the full blueprint, I'll let you know at the end how you can get a copy of it and But today what we're going to do is we're going to go through the 5 parts of that blueprint, and we will help you with getting more referrals. You know, a lot of what, a lot of what you are going to see on the blueprint— in fact, let's go to that. Applies to not only referrals but also reviews and repeat business, word of mouth. It all kind of ties in together, and ultimately the idea here is how do we get more better quality leads that convert at a higher rate that then help us make more money. It's basically how all of this works. So, you know, we all know all leads are not created equal. You've seen me do this, I'm sure you've seen me do this before, but, you know, if I gave you your choice of 5 leads to run today, internet, repeat, TV, referral, or newspaper, which lead would you want? First. Most, most people, me included, want the repeat customer first. Why do we want them? Well, they already know us, they already like us, they already trust us, hopefully, and, um, they're going to be a whole lot easier to sell. Where, you know, an internet lead or a TV lead might close at 28, 30, somewhere in there. A past customer is going to close at 60 or 70%, right? It's just a much more efficient and much more profitable lead. And so the question becomes, well, so doesn't it make sense for us as business owners, especially in the home improvement space, doesn't it make sense for us to focus just a little bit of time time and energy and money and effort to get more of these leads. So you're here today, so I'd imagine this is something that is important to you. So here is the blueprint, the whole blueprint. And again, at the end, I'll tell you where you can go and you can, you can get a copy of this. But there's basically 5 steps to this. And so I'm going to go through all 5. If you have— just a little bit of housekeeping— if you have any questions, just put them either into the chat box or into the Q&A. This, we're gonna— this is gonna be quick today, probably only about half an hour, maybe 40 minutes depending on the questions that come through, but impactful. Okay, so For those of you that don't know who I am, I am one of the founders of G4 Marketing Group, and basically we do all of this stuff for our clients. So everything that I'm going to share with you comes from experience. I'm also the host of the Wealthy Contractor Podcast and the author of the book The Seven Secrets to Becoming a Wealthy Contractor. I also wrote a book, and I'm actually updating that book as well. Called The Definitive Guide to Relationship Marketing. That'll be out in, um, sometime this summer, but that book is being completely updated for 2020. One other thing too, for, for those of you that don't follow us on Facebook, um, we post a lot of stuff there, um, so it if you'd like, go to facebook.com/thewealthycontractor, and, you know, there's more stuff there for you as, as well. All right, so the problem— so the problem that a lot of us are trying to solve is that most contractors, most businesses really that advertise spend a fortune to acquire or buy a customer. And let's, you know, let's not sugarcoat it, you know, advertising, marketing is really your effort in going out and buying customers. All right, and so it— and the price depends, the, the, the buy price of a customer depends on a lot of different factors, right? So most contractors spend a fortune to acquire a customer, then work their asses off to sell the job, install the job, and get paid for the job, only to completely ignore and neglect the customer after the job has been completed, resulting in a loss of huge backend opportunities for additional leads, sales, and profits. And again, the opportunity that is lost here is repeat business, people coming back and buying from you again. And let's be clear, by the way, let's be clear about repeat business, okay? So somebody just spent— most of you are probably in the replacement space that are, that are on here. So your average ticket, call it $10,000, okay? Even if it's $5,000, go all the way down to $5,000, the odds of somebody coming back and buying from you again within the next 30 days is very low, very low. And so what is the job The job is that after the job is— that you've completed this project for these people, right? Your job as the— in the business is to make an impression on these people and follow up and follow up and stay top of mind so that when they're ready for that next job which is not gonna be more than likely for 12, 18, 24 months. That's usually when they start kind of thinking about the next project, right? 12 to 24 months. So what you have to do is you have to bridge the time between the completion of the job and that 1 year. And if you, what most people do is they just, again, they just completely ignore them move on to the next person and hope and pray that when those people have the next job that they're going to call. Well, chances are good that within a few days, a few weeks, they've forgotten about you. Out of sight, out of mind. So again, the job here is to stay top of mind with them so that when that opportunity comes up for repeat to sell them something else, or for them to make a referral, we're their top of mind. So I call it staying in touch to stay top of mind. Keep in touch to stay top of mind, right? And that's how this works. If you're just passive about it and you're just like hoping and praying and waiting for them to come back to you, you're not going to get anywhere near, anywhere near what you could be getting or should be getting in terms of repeat and referral. Okay, so looking at the blueprint, step number 1, and this is a critical step. Each step is going to build on the next, you know, each step builds on the next. Step number 1 is Your commitment— you, I'm talking to you as the owner of the business— your commitment to creating customers for life. This is a tough one. This is a tough one because I had a conversation yesterday with, um, um, somebody that's, that's, uh, been in the business for over 10 years. Um, they're, um, they're doing Well, they've always been about the customer, but now that we've got— we're in the environment that we are in, he has completely like shifted his focus and said, look, we're going to be as a company, we're going to be completely and totally customer focused. And he wrote up— he calls it, um, his, um, oh God, what was the word? Concierge protocols or something like that. But it's a whole thing about, you know, this is step by step by step by step. Here's all of the things that we're going to do in order for us to stay sticky with our customer. And this is like above and beyond above and beyond the, you know, what you're going to see here today. I mean, he's not only sending them a gift to their house, but he's going to be sending them a gift to their workplace. They're not— they're going to go see every single customer after the job has been completed. I mean, there's a whole bunch of things that they're doing, and I was happy to see it. Because that to me is commitment. Being committed, okay? It's not half-assing it and saying, well, we're gonna try and get more referrals, or we're gonna try and create customers for life. There's no trying. You're either gonna do it or you're not gonna do it, okay? That's why, quite frankly, that's why more companies aren't doing this because they're just not willing to make the commitment. And what is the commitment? What is the commitment? The commitment is, again, putting effort behind it, putting money behind it, putting resources behind it, and getting your team behind it. So you'll see here, it's no more love them and leave them, okay? No more love them and leave them. This business, the replacement business, is notorious for love them and leave them. You know, I— one of my, one of my, my good friends built one of the biggest home improvement companies in the country. And when I met him, first met him and did some work for him in 2011 and 2012, his mindset was one and done, one and done. Once they do windows with us, they're done. They're never gonna do anything else. That's not true. That is not true. He added siding, he added roofing, became one of the biggest roofing companies in the country, right? Because, you know, there were only so many of that one product he could sell. And so then they had to like scramble and they had to, and that's, you know, where I came in was to help them build out a system that was going to do these things, but he still, he never was completely 100% committed, and so never got the full results that he could have gotten. I was just on the phone before the webinar started. I was on the phone with a client, gonna do, he said he's gonna do $5 million this year, and a big chunk of his business comes from relationships with customers. And it's— and he's worked at it. It's something that is ingrained in their company culture, right? So commitment is 100%. A commitment is not 99, it's not 90, it's 100%, okay? And so when you make that commitment, your business has to be designed around your customer, their experience, and their relationship with you. And it's got to become a part of the company culture. And you— I'm talking to the owners— you as the leader of your company, this has to come from you. It has to start with you, okay? So you look at the note down below, it says your customers are not automatically loyal just because they gave you money once. In fact, you should consider them unpredictable and susceptible to the seductions of the marketplace. What do I mean by that? What I mean by that is, who is trying to get your customer? Who is trying to get your customer? Your competition. How are they trying to get your customer? Through TV, home shows, direct mail, canvassing, whatever it is. And look, your customer, if you haven't talked to them in a month, if you haven't talked to them in a year, if you haven't talked to them in a year and a half, somebody comes, knocks on their door, or they're walking through a home show, or they see a TV commercial, they get seduced, right? And then they go and give what could have been your money to one of your competitors. So unless you do something continually, jar their memory to reinforce and nurture your relationship, chances are good you'll never see them, their money, or their friends again. Okay. So that's the first piece of that, is the commitment, and it's the most important piece. It's the foundational element. If you don't have that, none of the rest of this stuff matters. You could drop off now. You're not willing to make the commitment to put some time, some money, some effort, some resources behind this, drop off now, because the rest of it is not going to do you any good. Right, all right, I'm going to get to the questions at the end. Step 2: earn, earn the right to referrals and repeat business. Make your customers feel confident that they made the right choice with you. Okay, so your customer— think about this— so your customer, in order for, for you to get a review, in order for you to get a referral, in order for them to come back and buy from you again, they have to feel confident in your ability to duplicate what you initially did for them. So you delivered an amazing experience, they have to be confident that you can deliver that experience again. When it comes to making a referral, not only do they have to be confident, but they have to trust you that you are going to take as good care of their friend, family, neighbor, coworker, whoever, that they're going to take care of them as well, that you're going to take it— sorry, you're going to take care of them as well as you took care of the customer. Look, I don't know about you, I was talking about this with somebody, um, yesterday or the day before. It's like, I don't make a lot of referrals. There aren't a lot of people that I am confident enough in and I trust enough to take care of my clients or even my friends, right? When looking at your customer experience. How do you create magic moments? This is a Disney, uh, phrase. How do you create magic moments versus tragic moments? At great companies, they pay attention to the details. Okay, when you're looking at this, and step 2 is really all about the customer experience, okay, so it's all about paying attention to the details. You want to be exceptional at every point of interaction with your customer. You want to create wow moments. You want to be memorable. The note below: regardless of economic conditions, consumers expect us to do the job right, use the best materials, and adhere to the strictest standards. So a completely satisfied customer should be your minimum acceptable standard. To maximize referrals and differentiate yourself from the competition, you must work hard at creating raving fans. If you've been on any of my webinars before, you've heard me talk about this. We have to create raving fans. So, interesting statistic, and I, by the way, I think that both numbers I'm going to show you are much lower in home improvement than these. These are more general business numbers. But 83% of customers are willing to provide referrals, and yet only 29% of those customers actually do. Again, we can go with these numbers, but I actually think that the numbers are lower in home improvement. Well, why don't they refer more? Well, again, back to customer experience. The customer experience was okay. You did what you said you were gonna do. They're satisfied. To me, a satisfied customer is a liability because you don't have a system. You only have a system set up to create satisfied customers, not a system set up to create raving fans. You didn't give them a good enough reason to refer. I always say you didn't give them a story to tell. Every great company— think about this— every great company that gets a— that has a ton of loyalty, uh, brand awareness, whatever you want to call it, right? And I think Disney, by the way, think Disney. Every great company gives their customers a story to go and tell other people. What is your story? What is the story you're giving your customer to tell? Another reason is you didn't ask, and coupled with that is you just didn't stay in touch. So it's on the phone yesterday again with this, with this company that has made the real commitment to creating customers for life, and we're talking about referrals. Well, how do we get more referrals? Well, number one, referral is the toughest lead to make. And so they, you know, they wanted some magical formula for referrals. And they had these protocols in place that they have right now. And so the problem with it was that those— that program only lasted 2 or 3 days around the time that the job is being completed through to the— to, you know, a day or 2 after the job is completed. That's when the full ask was in place. And that's when they presented the referral program, and I said, okay, well, what about a month later? What about 3 months later? What about 6 months later? What are you gonna do to keep reminding them that you are referable, that you appreciate referrals, that you reward referrals? What are you gonna do? I mean, the only way you're gonna get more referrals is if you keep in touch, if you stay with them. Right, so I would— when it comes to customer experience, and I've done full presentations on customer experience, but the simple way to look at it is go through your entire process and look at every interaction that your customer has with your business and ask yourself a very simple question: at this interaction point, with the customer, whether it's on phone or it's in person, whatever it is, even a text message, even an email. What can we do here so our customers can't help but say wow? And that's how you start to build an amazing customer experience. Okay, so that's step 1 and step 2, okay? The commitment The actual earning the right to even ask for a referral, to ask for repeat business, to ask for a review— those are key. The next piece is demonstrating appreciation. Appreciation is a powerful marketing strategy, and I say to people all the time People just— your customer just spent $10,000 with you. You can't spend $50 or $100 or $25, whatever the number is, and send them a thank you gift? Really? Shame on you. How often today you really want to stand out in your, in your customer's mind? Send them a thank you. Nobody does it. Nobody does it. Nobody sends thank you cards anymore. Nobody sends a thank you gift. Be that one company that does. Show them appreciation, right? Everybody wants to be that special customer, including you and me. Right? I don't look for it, but man, when it happens, when somebody sends me a thank you, it's like, wow, you know. Demonstrate your sincere appreciation for their business. Sincere. Thank you so much. You know, what happens a lot in this industry is that we just look at the number. We look at the $10,000 and that's it. We don't see what's behind it. There's a person, a family, a family that has jobs. They work hard. They probably took on debt in order to buy this job from you. And you can't be sincerely appreciative of that and just send them something that says, thank you so much. We appreciate you. That's being out of touch. And that, by being short-sighted and, and sorry, but cheap about it, is not going to help you drive more repeat business and drive more referrals and drive more reviews to your business because you couldn't care less about the customer. It's obvious. Write thank you notes. Make what I call happy calls. Make personal visits. Send a gift. Show them that you sincerely appreciate them and their business. We send out this big box on behalf of our clients. To their customer. There's cookies in there. There's a thank you card. It's, it's got the brand, their branding on it. It's got their face on the cut, the, the owner's face on it. It's from the owner. We put a gift card in there so that they can pass along to a friend or that they can use for their next project. But we make a big deal out of it. And we say thank you, right? Look inside the box when the outside of the box says thank you, thank you. Is this, by the way, is this a bit of a commercial for what we do? Yeah, but at the same time, you can look at it that way or you can look at it as, okay, let me see what these people are doing. And if you wanna go knock it off, go knock it off, go do it yourself. Okay, don't be threatened by my showing you what, what we are, are doing here. Okay, go knock it off. And you don't have to be even this elaborate, right? The point here is just say thank you. But we're saying to the— we're saying to the customer, when they open up that box, you, you, Mr. and Mrs. Customer, are the most important person in our business. Thank you. That's what it says here. We appreciate having you as a customer, right? And then in the card it says some of the same stuff, right? We want to stand out. We want to stand out and we want to show them sincere appreciation. Okay, step 4: earn and use 5-star reviews to your advantage. So you want to consistently and systematically ask for customer reviews. That client I was just talking to, um, a year ago or 2 years ago, they had 12 Google reviews. 12. He's— today we just looked it up, he has 192 Google reviews and his rating is 5 stars. Unbelievable. The ideal range, by the way, is 4.6 to 4.8. 4.6 to 4.8. If you're under 4.6, you're losing leads, you're losing jobs, you're losing money. Okay, so you want to consistently and systematically ask for customer reviews. I'm going to do a case study with that, with that guy, because he's doing some really— he's taking our Authentic Feedback platform to, to another level. Okay, we want to drive reviews to the sites that matter. I was on the phone yesterday with another client and we were looking at, you know, where his reviews are showing up when somebody's going and searching and looking for his reviews. All of the stuff that shows up are all third-party sites, not their site. You don't want people going to third-party sites. Why? You want them— because all your competition is there, right? That's why you want to drive Google reviews and Facebook. You know, and only reason why, by the way, the only reason why we say Facebook and Better Business Bureau is because those show up on page 1, and not everybody has a Google account. So if they don't have a Google account, more than likely they have a Facebook account. So for our clients, we will drive them to Facebook. Okay, so we want to screen the feedback. So positive reviews, we want to turn those into Google and Facebook reviews. Negative reviews, we want to try and catch them before they end up online. We want to improve improve our processes based on that feedback. We want to use that feedback as an opportunity to wow the customer, to get better, and then to have them go and become a raving fan. And then you want to use those reviews in your marketing efforts and in your sales efforts. I helped a client put an ad together not last month, the month before, and I said, look, why don't we take your Google reviews And why don't we put them right in the ad? Because he had amazing customer reviews or Google reviews, high star rating and a lot of reviews. Like, why don't we take that and put it right in the ad? And we did, right? And they use that in their presentation, their sales presentation. So you gotta know what your customers and your prospects are going to be telling the world about you. Before they do it. So especially in today's 24/7 online world, look, somebody leaves a review now, they're not talking to just a few people, they're talking to the entire world, right? So this has become a huge piece of this puzzle. It— there are reviews. And again, these are the big three. There are different ways that you can do it. Our platform authentic feedback. We do it face to face, we use the direct mail, we use email, we use texting. It's work, you know, this stuff is work. By the way, one of the interesting things that we found out— we knew that this was true, we just didn't, we didn't have a number to put to it. So when you combine the appreciation with the asking for reviews, we noticed the 350% increase in the online reviews, the posted online reviews, with a gift versus no gift. Okay, I mean, we, you know, we do thousands of customers a week, so we've got tons of data to back all of this stuff up. The final piece here, the final piece here, and one of the most important— but remember, each builds on the one before. So we started with commitment, Then we went to earning the right to the review, referral, relationship, repeat business, right? That's all about the experience that they get. So your commitment, experience the customer gets, saying thank you the right way, using appreciation as a strategy. Then 4, making sure that we're getting feedback and driving online reviews. And then the last piece of this is keeping in touch forever. So I say— this is what I say to— they ask me, well, how long should I stay in touch with the customer? I say, well, as long as you want to be in business. So if you only want to be in business for a year, don't communicate with customers. You don't need to, right? Because you're only going to be around for a year. If you're going to be around for 5 years, right, then communicate with them for 5 years and then stop. But if you want to build a real business, something that's going to have value, so you're getting a nice piece of your business— I, I say at least a third, 35% of your business should be coming from repeat referral, word of mouth, relationships, reviews. 35%. Now I have clients that are at 60% plus, but 35% is a good target number. Okay, implement a system of interesting and informative, informative ongoing communications, including you can do postcards, letters, emails, newsletters. With newsletters, and I'll show you in a second, we do email and we do print newsletters. You can use phone calls, but what you want to do is you want to stay top of mind. You want to promote other services, and you want to continually be asking for referrals. You want to make sure you want to become your customer's trusted advisor for home improvement projects. Whatever it is that they want, you want them coming to you. And then with this, you want to make sure that when somebody refers you You want to make a big deal out of it. You want to acknowledge and you want to reward those referrals. So the note here is the majority of referral opportunities come long after the job has been completed. For maximum repeat and referral business, you need to remain top of mind with your customers 2 months, 6 months, 15 months even 60 months after you've completed their project. Assuming your customers are loyal and will call you when they need something else or recommend you when the opportunity comes will cost your business a lot of money. That is a bad assumption, and it will cost you money. Okay, out of sight, out of mind. So some of the ways that— these are some of the ways we do it. We use an email newsletter every month. We do 12 a year, second Thursday of every month, like clockwork. But the email newsletter is not all about windows or plumbing or roofing, or they don't give a crap about that. You got to make it interesting, engaging. Try and make it a little fun. Now, can you use this email newsletter to promote referrals, to promote your other services? Absolutely you can. Of course you can. We do. We do a print newsletter 4 times a year: January, April, July, and October. I look, you can do a different schedule, but that's our schedule. We send a print and mail newsletter. You'll notice recipe, movie trivia, referrals, tech article. We do an inspirational article. It's not all about windows and roofing. Again, they don't care about that stuff. Do we promote referrals? Hell yes, we promote referrals. Do we promote other services? Oh yes, we do. We use an insert for a lot of our— for our bigger clients that are doing 1,000 past customers or more every quarter. We do a news— a print or an insert that goes inside, double-sided. We use that to make leads. To promote other services. Look, just because they bought windows from you doesn't automatically make them know that, oh wait, they also do roofing, they do siding, they do gutters, they do bathrooms, whatever other stuff you do. They don't automatically know that. You got to keep reminding them of that. And I've been saying lately too, is you've got to be in the mailbox. There's much less competition in the mailbox. People are home, right? One of the things I love about using direct mail is it's stealth. We come in under the radar, unlike being on the internet or TV or home shows or magazines or newspapers, whatever. Your competition sees exactly what you're doing. What are you offering, right? What your financing offers are. With direct mail, it's just you and your customer. Competition doesn't know what the hell you're doing, right? Mail has to be touched. It's awesome. Okay, so, you know, when you're putting together a newsletter, which by the way, regardless of the business that you're in, whether it's B2B, B2C, whatever it is, does not matter, the number one way of staying in touch with customers is through a newsletter, a company newsletter. These are just some of the things that we include in our newsletters, okay? Recipes, fun facts, quotes, one home improvement or home maintenance article, okay? We'll do something family-oriented or general interest. We'll do something technology-related, right? We do a movie trivia contest. We talk about referrals. We introduce them to the referral rewards program. Okay, like I said, you know, with the company I was talking with yesterday, you know, having a referral program that only lasts a day or two is not a referral program. A referral program is something that's going to constantly be in front of your customer because again Out of sight, out of mind. And like everything else we do, we don't take any of this stuff to chance. We create a contest every quarter, we have a website, we send out mail, we send out email, we do news. I mean, all of this stuff all ties back in to keeping in touch with the customer so that they understand that, hey, You know, these people did this for me. They are referable. They have an opportunity to refer them to somebody, blah, blah, blah. Here's how I do it. Here's how to get a hold of them, right? By the way, you do a good job of staying in touch with your customers, then you could go hit them at different times of the year and do special promotions. That are just for customers. So we do what we call reactivation re-engagement programs. I've helped clients do annual customer appreciation events. For what's going on right now, we came up with our home improvement stimulus relief check mailer. I mean, there's a bunch of stuff that you can do if you are staying in touch with your customers and you've done all of the other pieces, right? There's 5 pieces to this, right? Stay in touch, get the feedback, and make sure— I'm gonna go backwards now— get the feedback and make sure that you have a raving fan. Go back a step, make sure you've made that customer feel special and you've used appreciation to show them, hey, We really care about you. And then you've delivered an amazing customer experience. You've earned the right because you've built trust and confidence in what you do. And then ultimately, this all stemmed from your commitment now to creating customers for life. Okay, so I'm going to do a quick commercial here and then I'll get to questions. We help our clients, you know, get more reviews, referrals, develop relationships. Again, listen, we're not for everybody. We're not for everybody, but for some of you, we may be a good option. We make it easy. We do all the work for you. We go into your database, pull out the info, put it into our proprietary database called Activate, and from there we execute on appreciation, we execute on feedback and review requests, we enroll your customers into your new referral rewards program, and then we begin a long-term top-of-mind customer nurture, uh, campaign. Okay, um, I'm not going to go over incentives. I'm not going to try and sell you our program today. In fact, Everything with our program starts with just a 10-minute phone call. We call them discovery calls. We don't know if we can help you, and so this call is simply to find out if we can help you get more reviews, get more referrals, and more repeat business. I'm going to put up a poll, and, um, if you would just let us know Yes, I'm interested in a 10-minute discovery call. Maybe, I need more information. Or yes, please, let's get on a 10-minute call and let's see if we can, if we can help you out. So I'm going to leave this poll up for, for a minute here. By the way, questions either in the chat box or the Q&A box. So again, on the poll, I'm going to leave it up here for a little bit longer. Um, yes please, maybe I need more information, or no, not right now. And I'm fine with no. Again, take all of the information I showed you. All of these webinars are about, um, helping you be more successful, whether that's you doing it, us doing it, either way, fine with me. All right, so another few seconds here. Yes, please. Maybe. Or no. And I'm perfectly fine with no. And I'll get to questions. Okay, good question. Michael Torres asked a good question. Justin, good question. Okay, I'll get to those in just a second. All right, I'm going to end the poll here. Okay. All right, so, um, by the way, that's the URL if you want to get a copy of the blueprint. G4marketing.com/blueprint. So Justin asked, how long after doing the first job do you stop contacting the customer when there's no jobs done for that per— how long after doing the first job when there's no jobs done or no more jobs? Look, um, how long after the first job do you stop contacting the customer I don't know. You don't. How do you know there isn't anything? How do you know there isn't a referral opportunity? You don't. Look, we work with a lot of companies that are one-product companies, a lot of them roofers, by the way. Some of our most successful clients, by the way, are roofing companies. A roof's one product, 20-year, 50-year warranty. And yet our clients are doing, uh, gifts, uh, newsletters, emails to stay in touch. Why? Because they want referrals. Just because they can't buy another project from you, you know, doesn't mean you stop communicating with them, because now you're going to have, you know, you have the opportunity for referrals. Um, Michael asked, we have 1,000 past customers over 15 years. Who we've never contacted after the first sale. How do we decide who to reach back to after so much time? So here's, here's my kind of my general rule of thumb is I'll go back depending on the number. I'll go back 1 to 3 years with an initial reactivation campaign. Okay, there's any number of ways you can do it. You can reach out to us and we can help you with that. But, um, anybody more than 2 or 3 years hard-pressed to even have a good address. Chances are good of those 1,000, over 15 years, I don't know what the exact number is, but probably a big chunk of them have moved. They're not even in the house anymore. So I initially would start with the 1 to 3 year group and then you can do some testing after that. You first, you want to see how responsive the most recent ones are before you start going to everybody else. Um, when writing thank you cards, I throw in 2 to 3 business cards and ask for a referral. What points do you try to make in the card that you send out? Well, you know, with the thank you card, for us, we just make it about the thank you. So we mention the referral program, we put a gift card in there, like an actual, like, plastic with Raise Numbers gift card in there. And we say to them, hey, here's a gift card that you can use for your next project, or you can pass along to a friend. But then we, a couple weeks later, then is when we really start the communications about referrals. But What points do you try and make in the card that you send out? Well, again, you want to be careful with the initial thank you card. And just, again, my feeling on it is it's just a thank you card, and then there's a separate message for referrals. You could put— by the way, here's how you could do it in your example. You can just do, PS, we really appreciate your referrals and rely on them to, um, to keep our business moving forward. So I've enclosed a couple of my business cards, and I'd really appreciate it if you would pass them on to anybody that you think would benefit from us. You could do something like that. Give us an example of a thank you card that you would write. So here's one. Thank you. Hi Angie, on behalf of everyone here at Company Name, we'd like to thank you for your trust and your business. From the moment you chose Company, you became part of our family, and we personally wanted to let you know how important you are to us. Your complete satisfaction is our most important goal, so for any reason you weren't extremely satisfied with our team's service, please call us right now at or email so we can make it right. Rest assured, even though your project has been completed, our dedication and commitment to you continue as part of the family. We'll do our part to stay in touch and continue to work hard to be your trusted home improvement resource for life. Thank you again. We use picture, actual picture of the people. So that is an example. I don't normally do that stuff, but there you go. Any other questions? All right, so I'm gonna go back here. If you are interested in meeting with us for that 10-minute discovery call, if you answered the poll, we'll reach out to you. But if you didn't have a chance to go through the poll. There's contact information. We will send you follow-up email after this as well with the replay and with Pete's information. But again, this is totally no obligation call. It's 10 minutes. It's quick. We're going to ask you a few questions about you, about your business, and together we'll determine whether or not it warrants us having a further conversation. If we can't help you, we'll, we'll make recommendations if we can to other resources for you to help with all of this stuff. All right. So again, I went a little bit over. Sorry. But if you— I don't see any other questions, although hold on a second, actually. Oh, wait. Will this live webinar be available after? Yes, it will. What do you think is the easiest way to get referrals? Web forms or handouts that people can give people. You have to do it all. There is no easy with referrals. I say it all the time, referral is the toughest lead to make, and so it takes— it's gonna take a little bit of work. Jerry, do most companies build a percentage into their job cost for the referral program or as a part of their annual marketing budget? If so, how much should you allow? So most of our clients clients fall somewhere in the 5 to 8% of their marketing budget, not of revenue, just of their marketing. So it's a tiny little sliver of the marketing budget. And yes, the customer pays for everything. So add $100. If they, if they agreed to $10,000, they'll agree to $10,100. So add $100 in there. So that you can do all the stuff that you need to do to stay in touch with your, with your customer. Wendy said, excellent information. Thank you. You're very welcome, Wendy. You know, and it's interesting too, the whole idea of, well, how much should you spend or how much should you allow? It's like anything with marketing. As much as you possibly can. How do you get more leads than your competition? You're willing to outspend your competition, right? You're willing to pay more for a lead. Now, that goes into a whole nother topic of, well, make sure that you have a profit model that will, that can afford to pay for that lead, because if not, it's a recipe for going out of business real quick. But you gotta allow as much as you possibly can. But, you know, $50, $100 is a good place to start, and you can build that right into the job. Which, by the way, there's nothing wrong with. Customer pays for everything, including the excellent service and excellent communication that they're gonna get from you after the job is done. Including the gift that you are going to send them. You don't pay for it, they pay for it. And you know what? They are happy to pay for it because it contributes to the experience. Okay, it's all part of the experience. When you buy a car and they send you something, right, who— where does that come from? Comes out of what you paid for the car. Right? Same thing with this. Alan said the blueprint, blueprint will clarify and coordinate our planning. Thank you. You're welcome. I'm glad to hear it. All right. So if there are not any other questions, we will wrap up for today. Thanks for being here. I hope this was valuable for you. And there will be a replay probably up by the end of the week. And if we can help you at all, let us know. We are here to help. All right, thank you all. Talk to you next time.