Referrals through friends and employees

[Steve]

One of our forum members operates a jewelry store and is always looking for ways to expand his business. I find it fun to take the marketing ideas we have talked about for other uses and apply them to this kind of business. In a jewelry store I was thinking about what kind of percentages you can play with and use when creating a referral program. Surely there must be a national average of what sales staff gets per sale. Instead of giving the % sale to the sales staff, could you create a business card sized discount card that maybe offers a discount for a preferred customer? Could you then have a section for a person's name on the card where you can hand them out to friends, family or co-workers. The person who gets the card can fill in their name. On the card it says the bearer is entitled to a X % preferred customer discount. Maybe it has an expiration date on it to control the testing of the card. Also it might sale can not be combined with any other offer as well as this card must be surrendered at time of purchase. The friend who was initially given this card can fill in their name and then hand them out to their friends. They can say, 'oh I am really tight with the owner and the owner gave me a preferred customer card.' This then becomes a gift card in a sense. As these cards come in, you keep track of who initially handed it out. Then you can give them a referral fee based on possibly a % of the final sale. So in the end, the bearer gets a discount and the person who gave the bearer the card, gets some cash from the sale. You could also give a handful of these cards out to each new customer you get to entice them to hand the cards out to their friends and family members. Such referrals should really help improve the bottom line and bring in a lot of people. What is your view on that?

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[CHEESE2009]

Lawn care business tips

I have tried referral systems before, but I have never thought of doing that! It is worth a shot for sure! It's kind of like a pyramid scheme, without the scam! Doing this sort of thing with lawn service however, we would need to put in bold lettering our areas of service. Other than that, this is an amazing idea. I already spent an arm & leg this month on gear & materials, though I will surely try this out in the near future!

[Steve]

Well if you think about it, if you are already planning on giving a sales person a certain percentage of the sale to make the sale, why not harness your friends, families and customers to become sales people and give them that same percentage?

I think this may work better where you have a higher profit margin than a lower one.