The Boss of You

By now most of us know the “it costs more to get a new client than to keep an exist­ing one” bit of busi­ness savvy, but one of the other cus­tomer sat­is­fac­tion rules we fol­low in our own busi­ness is reward­ing exist­ing clients who send you new ones. We’ve never taken out an ad for our busi­ness and have been very blessed to rely solely on client refer­rals for almost all of our busi­ness pver six years (a small per­cent­age find us through web searches). When we know how a client found out about us, ie/ who referred them, we always send that per­son some kind of thank you, typ­i­cally in the form of flow­ers. Since they’ve already sent the work our way, some may say that’s overkill but we feel oth­er­wise. We are so very grate­ful to our clients for help­ing us grow our busi­ness and for being will­ing to send us the work in the first place that a heart­felt thank you comes very eas­ily indeed.

I’m reminded of this today because a firm that we reg­u­larly refer our clients to sent me a very unex­pected thank you in the mail today, for refer­ring a client their way. As I say, we’ve referred folks there in the past, and always hap­pily because not only do they offer a decent prod­uct but their cus­tomer ser­vice has (in my expe­ri­ence) always been really excel­lent. When I have a ques­tion I know who to phone, she always fol­lows up, and she always gives me an hon­est answer, even if it isn’t one that I like. What was great about the thank you I received today was not just that they sent me a gift, but that they took the time to thank me. The thank you card included infor­ma­tion as to which refer­ral they are reward­ing me for, as well as some happy text about their appre­ci­a­tion. I was always happy to refer folks their way in the past, but I admit they’ll now remain very top of mind, and in a busi­ness where you need a way to set your­self apart from com­pe­ti­tion I think this is much more effec­tive than any hokey ad campaign.