What you need is a big tombola…

tombola
So, picture the scene. We’re in a Mastermind session, it’s 8.01am and I’m sat round the table with nine of the best business brains in the country. The member who has got the first slot kicks off  and tells the group that his challenge for this session is how to generate 200 referrals a month for his dental practice.

He shared with the group his current referral strategy, i.e. a business card which offers a £20 Marks & Spencer voucher to every patient who refers someone else into the business. Both parties, i.e. the referrer and the referee both get the £20 voucher.
It currently yields him around 20 referrals a month but he feels that he can do a lot better.
The whole group assure him that he’s right and we came up with a simple, fun and effective way to generate hundreds of referrals based on the initiative that we used at the recent National Event  and which yielded over 100 referrals into our Partnership Programme in a single day.
Our smart, progressive dentist simply needs to install a nice, clear plastic tombola drum into his reception and fill it with 500 small coloured envelopes. Each envelope will contain a ticket to a prize.
Across the 500 envelopes he can toss in an iPad or two, maybe a Kindle, tea at the Ritz, some cinema tickets, free toothpaste, a top of the range electric toothbrush, you get the idea, maybe even some free check-ups or a hygienist visit.
He needs 50 or 60 prizes of good value and the rest of the envelopes have small prizes in.
When we did this in Bolton, the majority of the envelopes won either a wagon wheel biscuit or a sheriff’s badge (there was a lot of feeling around the Wild West!) but others also won big prizes –  which is what got their attention and got the referrals generated.
It’s simple and easy to run; each referral card completed gets you a draw on the tombola. Want another draw? Give us another referral. In a dental practice with appropriately trained reception staff he’ll get dozens of referrals every day.
By having the tombola prominent, perhaps a nice visual graphic behind it that highlights the prizes and what people can win, and a proactive member of staff getting people to fill in their cards  and draw out (they also want to have a camera handy so they can take pictures of the winners for the next newsletter or social media).
It’s a genuine win-win.
So much so, that at 8.45am when we finished going through all this, two other members of the same Mastermind group declared that they’d already got sufficient value from the day. That’s pretty  good before 9 o’clock isn’t it?
Now, some of you reading this will be thinking “if only I had a dental practice where I could use that idea”!
Well, the truth of it is, that concept will work in almost any business where you have a steady foot flow of customers coming in to see you.
However, if you don’t see customers on a daily basis like dentists do then adopt the other approach that we took within the Partnership Programme and run a referral campaign for a month, say,  when you go out to your existing customers, by direct mail, email and other ways and you invite them to give you a referral because every referral goes into a prize draw and your existing customers can win great prizes like trips to New York, MacBook Pros, etc.
Now, you can afford to offer prizes like this because it’s all about the numbers.
Let me go back to that dentist example for instance. He’s got 500 envelopes in the tombola.
Let’s say that those 500 referrals that will be generated from them will lead to 200 new patients. He knows that a new patient is worth £600 a year on average so, those 200 new patients will yield  to £120,000 worth of business (and he could get them all in a month). What would you pay to get 200 new clients who were worth £120,000 a month?
You’d certainly give away a handful of tech stuff or buy a couple of weekend breaks, wouldn’t you? And that’s all that you’re doing here. It’s just another reminder of the importance of knowing  your numbers.
Of course, some of you will be very specific markets around B2B for instance and in those environments the guaranteed way to get a nice steady flow of referrals is to invite all your new customers/clients to lunch, but book it six months out so that you have time during those six months to prove to them just how great you are.
What you tell them is that you book the restaurant for four people and that you’ll come along to that meeting in six months time not only having shown them what a great job you can do, but also you’ll bring along someone who will be great for their business, i.e. a referral for them.
In return, they’ll come to lunch with someone who will be great for your business. Hey presto – a guaranteed referral. Every time. When I built my consultancy business, over ten years ago now, that little approach worked like a dream for me. Never failed. Not once.
Of course, I’ve shared it with many people in the years since but hardly anyone does it. Too much effort, you see. Too much like hard work but, once again, it’s doing the hard work that makes the selling easy.
And that’s why what you need is a big shiny tombola…