The Chimney Cleaning Association of America couldn't sell because customers couldn't see dirty chimneys or the work. The solution: collect personal fireplace stories from past customers, publish them with names attached on the website. Traffic jumped from one daily visitor to 500 in two days, and members' businesses grew because people shared their own stories.
I got a call from the Chimney Cleaning Association of America. You think pharmacy and being a pharmacist, you think pharmacies is hard? Try being a chimney cleaner. Like, that's a hard business. I get a call from them and they say, we're having a difficulty selling our services. No one buys from us. And like, I'm not surprised. They said, here's our problem, Mike. When we dispatch someone to clean a chimney, if you have a chimney at your house, I'm sure you do for your furnace or a fireplace, like, you don't stick your head up inside the chimney to see how dirty How dirty is it today? No one knows they have a problem. And they said, when we render our services, we have to go up on the roof and they don't see us actually doing anything. They can't see a before and after. And they said, and our mascot isn't so popular. Mary Poppins. She takes your children and runs away. They said, we got a real issue. In fact, the president of the association who called me to help, and our team, to help address this systemic problem for all the chimney cleaners, said our website where we list all of our members is indicative of the problem we have. We have about 1 visitor a day, which was the association president just going on the website to see if it is still up and running. So here's what we did. We used the power of names. You can do the same or a variant of this. We reached out to every past client that these chimney cleaners had and we started collecting stories. We reached out and said, we want to hear stories about your experiences in front of the fireplace. Now remember this, your customers never buy the product or service you provide, they buy the benefit it derives. No one buys a clean chimney, we buy a safe chimney for a roaring fire. So we reached out to customers, we collected their questions, I mean we collected their comments about stories in front of the fireplace. And stuff came in from the Northeast of these crazy winter storms that would come through and how people warmed up their bones in front of the fire. Stories of celebrations, sweet 16 birthday parties and 50-year anniversaries, all in front of people's favorite fireplace. And one story that was a tearjerker was a 12-year-old young girl who shared that her father passed away in front of the fireplace, and that that was his favorite spot in the house, and the whole family had gathered there. And in her story, she recounted that as her father took his final breath, she couldn't bear to look at him. Which I totally get, and she looked away at the fireplace, and at that moment, the fire sparked. And she said, "That's the day I believed that God existed." And so these stories came in, and we collected them. Now remember the power of names. We went to the Chimney Cleaning Association site, and we started listing all these stories, the celebrations and so forth, and we gave attribution to the people that contributed to the stories. Well, guess what? With the 50 stories we had, how many visitors came to the website do you think the next day? 50, and the day after about 500. Why? Because those people, just like a newspaper story, were telling their friends to check it out, and then their friends wanted to contribute stories and get attribution to their own name. Names are magnetic, and people started contributing, and business went up.
