The George Clooney Close | Turn Your Clients Into Selfless Sales People (#78)

In this episode, I break down how to turn your clients into loyal, selfless salespeople, without begging for referrals or bribing them with lame discounts.

We’re talking about building a referral system based on reciprocity—where both the referrer and the referred person benefit. It’s simple, smart, and it works because it taps into how people actually behave.

I also share one of my favourite stories; how George Clooney gave $1 million to his 14 best mates, with one condition that created the perfect mix of generosity and social pressure. There’s a huge business lesson in that, and I’ll show you how to apply it directly to your cleaning biz.

If you want more referrals without being awkward or pushy, this is the episode for you.

Follow Jason Shipway on social media to stay up to date.
Instagram link @jasoncleans (click me)
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Transcript

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(Transcribed by TurboScribe.ai. Go Unlimited to remove this message.) Welcome back to self-made episode 78. Wow, we're well on our way to 100. Now, today's going to be another short little episode. I'll be talking about how to build a strong referral system in your business. It's going to trump any sort of advertising you can do. And best part is it doesn't cost you anything besides maybe time. And depending on what you want to give your referrals as a bonus, maybe a bit of money. So in my business, especially, organic has really overshadowed any amount of paid advertising I've done. I've done very minimal paid advertising. And that is because our organic has been so strong from the very, very start. So the majority of our business now comes from organic search. So SEO and TikTok and stuff, but another large portion of it comes from word of mouth and referral. About 35% comes from word of mouth referral, about a third of all of our customers. So very big chunk of that. Now, it's hard to predictably scale word of mouth. Like you can't really scale word of mouth. I mean, you can arbitrarily, but it's not like you put a hundred bucks into a meta ad and you know that you're going to get, you know, four leads and one or two customers out of that. It's not that black and white, but it is so powerful that you cannot ignore it. So we're going to be talking about that today. And if you listen to the last episode, if you're listening in chronological order, you'll know that I talked a bit about our rough patch. So yeah, we lost a lot of staff. We lost a few clients, took a bit of a dip, and it's been, I don't know, it's been about four weeks since we kind of went through that. And we're almost kind of back to where we were. So yeah, it's definitely been a tough time for some of the team members, for our management and for our team leaders and supervisors and trainers. Definitely been a tough time. It's been all hands on deck, a lot more work than what they would usually do. But yeah, they've weathered the storm. They've definitely done well to hold down the fort and keep the ship sailing. So huge props to my team. And yeah, my management team has done great and we prevailed. So that's just what happens in business. It's not always going to be a straight line upwards. You're not just going to have, you're not just going to have clear cut growth all the way to the moon. There are going to be some dips. And even I had to remind myself of that because it is easy to get caught up in the momentum of your business and forget about those ebbs and flows. So yeah, we took a bit of a dip and we recovered or we're still recovering, but yeah, it's been tougher than usual, but that's just the way it goes. So yeah, let's talk about today's topic, the referral system. So if you don't have a referral system in your business yet, plain and simple, you need to have one. It's a lot more powerful than you think. And if you do it right, not if you just do it, you know, willy nilly, like, oh yeah, refer a friend and get 10% off or you get 20 bucks off your next clean. No, if you do it right, if you have a good incentive, if you have a good system in place with a good structure, you will see very big results. So that's what we're talking about in this episode. We're really going to dive into how to build a killer referral system, one that actually works because it's designed around real human behavior, not just discounts and gimmicks. All right, so let's dive in. I don't really have any notes. I've prepared a few things here and there's something I want to talk about. The George Clooney close. So if you don't know what I'm talking about there, stick around. If you do have some sort of idea, stick around anyway, because I'm going to tie it into what I'm talking about. So yeah, like I said, most of our clients come from organic. A lot of them do say they come from word of mouth. A lot of them are referral. And especially in Perth, I really pushed, and Perth is our newest location of the business. So in Perth, I really pushed for referral business. I tried to incentivize my existing customer base as much as possible to push new business through to us because obviously it's the most effective form. People trust people. If you can get someone who's come from a friend or a family member that has vouched for your business, that person is going to be a much, much more qualified lead than someone that's come from an ad that doesn't even know who you are. Plus, it's not going to cost you anything. It's not going to be a hard sell, all right? So most of my customers have come from that, especially in our new location. It's been paramount in our growth here. We have one particular customer in Perth who has now referred me four clients. And the lifetime value of that, or the yearly value of him and all the clients he's referred to me is probably about 40 grand. So just like that, I got one client that's snowballed into now five. So him plus four others, and it's resulted in quite a bit of money. So very, very cool. And yeah, that's just it. People trust people more than ads. So referrals really are your best way to get high quality leads. And most people aren't doing much to encourage that. They're just hoping that their customers talk about them. And that's not really the best way to go about it. That's kind of like just pissing into the wind in business. You know, just hoping that your customers are going to be happy enough to talk about your service. They may be happy, but I can tell you now, if there's no incentive for them to talk, they're not going to do so. It's hard enough to get people to leave a review on Google. You think it's going to be any easier to get them to refer a friend to you? A referral for someone is actually, it's a really tough mental hurdle to get over. Because if you think about it, they're telling someone that trusts them to engage a business or a service or go see someone. And as soon as they do that, whatever happens next is out of their control. And if their friend or family member has a bad experience with the business that they referred, then that's going to negatively affect them. That detracts from their status, or that denotes their status in their relationship. Because now they've referred their friend or trusted person that's in their life to a business, and then they've had a bad experience. So that's going to reflect poorly on them, and they don't want that. So referring is actually a risky process for the referrer. They really have to trust you, and they really have to like you and see that there is going to be an intrinsic benefit in the person they're referring to do business with you. So not really an easy sell. So how do we incentivize people and make people feel comfortable referring their friends and family members and maybe even strangers to do business with you? Well, step one, of course, is, and I can't really do this for you, but you need to have a good service, right? You can't have a good referral system if your core service isn't good. So take a good hard look at what you're doing and ask yourself, would I refer my mum to my business? Would I be comfortable and happy to refer someone I trust and know and love to do business with me? Like, do you really go above and beyond for your customers? Do they have consistently a great experience with you? And would they realistically recommend you to other people? That is step one, plain and simple. I can't help you build a good referral system if your service isn't good. I mean, yeah, so that's step one. But then step two is you need to have a good incentive. And I don't mean like, oh, get 50 bucks off your next claim if you refer someone or get 15% off or 25% off. You need to introduce the law of reciprocity into the mix. And what I mean by that is, instead of saying you can get 50% off your next claim, you can say you get 50% off your next claim and the person you refer will get 50% off their first claim as well. Or in my case, I used to tell people they would get their next claim free if they referred someone, didn't have a lot of success with it. I simply changed it to say, get 50% off your next claim and your friend or family member or whoever you refer will also get 50% off their first claim. Guess what happened? The next week, I started getting referrals. I didn't get any referrals under the old system. Well, I did get people that would say they were recommended by a friend, but no one even bothered to claim the offer. Whereas then, once I changed that little thing, I'd gone from just giving away a free claim to 50% off claims, I started to get referrals and I started to get people claiming that bonus, which was great because then I could track the feedback from that referral system. And the reason people did that was because of the law of reciprocity. You'd be surprised, people aren't as selfish as you think. You can offer someone 100 bucks or 200 bucks to leave a Google review and they won't do it. You can offer someone two free claims if they refer someone and they're not gonna be compelled to do it. But if they know that they're going to benefit someone else, if they know that if they refer someone, they're going to get something out of it, then they're gonna be much more incentivized to actually do that. Maybe that person has helped them with something and now they wanna pay it back by giving them this referral bonus. So the law of reciprocity comes into effect there. And for most people, they just don't care about the money. They actually care about the social status that comes from the referral. So like I said, if someone has a bad experience with a business that they were referred to by someone else, that actually affects their relationship with the person that referred them. Because now they're not gonna trust that person with their recommendations anymore. Oh, you sent me to so-and-so mechanic, I had a terrible experience. I'm not gonna trust you for recommendations anymore. And that affects their relationship. That affects the social status. But if you flip it around, if someone is able to refer you somewhere and you have a great experience, and not only that, but you get a discount or a nice incentive or a free bonus or a gift, that will give you so much more social status because you gave that to that person essentially, rather than you just getting 50% off your next claim, which you don't really care about. In this case, you not only get a gain or a benefit or a gift, but you also have the ability to increase someone else's social status, which is a much more powerful motivator. And you'll remember at the start of this podcast, I talked about the George Clooney close, if you have any idea what that is. So basically George Clooney offered 14 of his closest mates a million bucks in cash, but he added one simple rule. If even one person said no, no one gets anything. And you know what happened? Obviously everyone took the money. But if he didn't add that rule, he probably would have had a bunch of his friends, maybe even all of them would have just refused it because pride comes into effect, status comes into effect. People don't wanna be seen as selfish. If each of them took that money, they would feel selfish. They would feel like they lack pride. But if he introduces that rule, suddenly it becomes a selfless act to take a million dollars, which is just crazy. Like what a close, what a great idea. And you can do the same thing with your referral system. You can turn it from being a selfish act into a completely selfless act by just making it so that there is a law of reciprocity where they get rewarded or they get compensated. And so does the referral that they sent through as well. They also get an added bonus or a gift or whatever you wanna do for your referral system. Okay, so that's the psychology I love to tap into with referrals. If I can make my clients feel like they're doing something good for someone they care about, they'll jump at the chance. Same exact thing with George Clooney. He made his friends feel like they were doing a great thing for other people. And not only that, but if they did the opposite thing, they'd be doing a terrible thing for the other people. Imagine you had the opportunity to take away a million dollars from 13 other people. Or you could just have a million dollars for yourself and the other 13 people also get a million dollars. Pretty easy sell. So that one thing makes a huge difference. And you can see why. You can see that psychological shift that happens from that one thing. And it's a very extreme example with trying to give people a million dollars. Again, you would think like, oh, no brainer. Everyone would take a million bucks. But we forget that we're humans. So we have very complex emotions. Pride and status and selfishness and selflessness are very big motivators here. So the law of reciprocity, super, super important in the context of a referral system. Just something to think about. Just that small shift from going from like, oh, get 15% of your next claim, get your next claim free, get your next claim 50% off into get your next claim free. And the person you refer will also get their next claim free. And the economics of that still work really well. Like one customer on average for us is worth like 5,200 a year. Actually more now, it's worth about 6,500 a year. So if that person refers another client and that client is also worth 6,500, that's$13,000 a year between two people. So am I inclined to give them 250 bucks in free bonuses if I give them a free clean each or 50% off their next clean each? Yeah, would you give up 150 bucks to make six and a half grand? Probably, especially if you didn't have to spend any of your own cash out of your pocket or any time or any energy to get that client because that isn't actually money you're spending. That's just money you're taking off the table. That's just profit that you're sacrificing to make a delayed profit later on, if that makes sense. And as long as step one is fulfilled, as long as you have a good service, that person's gonna stick around. And then what happens is you create a compounding effect or a snowballing effect where one person refers one person, that person might refer another person, that person might refer two people, and those two people might refer someone as well. And then the first person all the way back that referred all those other people might refer another person and another person. And before you know it, you've built up this massive network of referred people and you didn't have to spend any time, any money, or any effort to get that. So referrals are the best form of gaining business. It is unpredictable. It isn't really scalable, but it is the best way to do it. It's the best way to get qualified leads that trust you and that are ready to do business with you and ready to spend money for whatever you're offering. So that's step one, have a good service. Step two, introduce the law of reciprocity into your referral offer. And step three, keep doing it. Don't stop there. Make the person that got referred, refer more people, keep the cycle going, keep the flywheel turning and expand your network of referrals. So if you want a few tips for making your referral program effective and actually work, keep it simple. I would say just one clear action, one clear reward. Make it personal. Don't make it feel corporate. Celebrate the people who refer as well. Post about it, thank them publicly, send them a card. Just make them feel appreciated because they're doing a really big thing for you. They're not just telling someone about your business, they're sacrificing or potentially risking their social status with that person by referring them. Because once they refer that person to you, it's out of their hands and the ball's in your court and you can do anything with that. So it's a big risk on their part, a lot bigger than we realize. And also just let people know it exists. You know, if you have a referral system in your business now, do you think your customers even know about it? I remember back in the day I had a service guide. It was like this PDF and I had a referral offer in the very back of it. Like on the last page, it was like, you know, refer a friend and get 50% off or whatever I said back then. My customers probably never even got that far in the service booklet. So most people may not have even known that that was even a thing. So great way to do it is just every clean you do, just leave a little card there. It could be like a business card or like a tiny little like A5 flyer that just has like, oh, thank you for letting us come by and take care of your home, blah, blah, blah. If you have any feedback, all that stuff, you wanna leave a review. And then at the bottom, you're gonna have a call to action that says, by the way, if you refer a friend or family member or someone you know, you can get this, this and that. And the person you refer will also get this bonus as well. So make it known, make it clear, don't hide it, okay? Because they're not gonna go and find it themselves. You need to take it upon yourself as the business owner to let your customers know about the referral system. Because trust me, even if you think that they might know about it, they probably don't if you have one right now. So make it very obvious what you do, make it very obvious about this referral system and don't ever stop talking about it, okay? Bonus tip is name the program. Like give it a nice catchy name, like Friends Clean Free or the Good Neighbors Referral Club or whatever. Just make it fun, make it memorable and just make it something that people wanna be a part of, like a network or a group within your business, a group of people that refer. And that's pretty much it. So yeah, a challenge for you, if you don't already, set a referral system up this week, literally today. You could just post on your socials, hey, if you love what we do, refer a friend and you both get 50 bucks off your next claim or you both get 50% off your next claim or whatever bonus you wanna give away, whatever you feel comfortable doing and then boom, you're off and running. So if you do try it, tag me, show me, let me know the results. A lot of people have been messaging me from listening to this podcast, telling me that they've tried things that I've just said in like a fleeting comment or I've just said as part of the episode and they said, oh, I actually tried this and it worked. And I'm like, yeah, cause this is stuff that I've done as well. I'm just extracting thoughts from the depths of my head. I'm just extracting thoughts and experiences and ideas based on what I've done, what I've succeeded with, what I've failed with. Pro tip, don't copy my failures if you don't wanna fail, but copy my successes. So don't go and do a crappy referral system where you just offer like 20% off to one person. Copy my success where I offered the law of reciprocity referral, where I gave 50% off to the, what do you call it? Referee, the referrer, that's probably it and the person they referred. Copy that, don't copy the mistake. But yeah, a lot of people have been messaging me and just telling me like they've tried this or they've tried that and it's been great. It's really cool to see. I love to see people are listening and actually taking action. So I'm not just talking to a brick wall. So if you do give that a go, make sure you let me know and also update me on how it goes because it did make a big impact in my business. It was literally like I flipped a switch, like night and day between the old referral system I had and the new one. So really the only two differences I made there was that I changed the offer from 50% off your next claim to 50% off your next claim plus the person you refer also gets half price off the next claim and I just made it a lot more obvious. I started to leave flyers on people's benches and I was sending out routine emails just with an update or a notice. It's like, hey, if you love what we do, we'd love if you referred someone to us and by the way, this is the referral offer. Just made it a lot more obvious and I started getting referrals almost immediately after that. And we're just about to implement something like I used to do in the business where I would leave like a flyer behind that had all that info on there. So we're gonna be doing up this new info pack that's gonna be on like this little sheet, sorry, a card. It'll be an actual card, not a piece of paper and it's gonna have a bunch of stuff on there, just like a simple thank you note that we're gonna leave after every claim with a QR code they can scan for feedback or if they wanna speak to the local area manager about anything. And it's also gonna have in big bold text in a call to action box at the bottom of the card, our referral system, because we really wanna bolster that and double down on it because we do have such a big network of clients now and we wanna leverage that. We wanna leverage the people they know because yeah, now we've got like over 300 clients, recurring clients. They've all got friends and family members. All those friends and family members have houses. They might have offices that need to be cleaned. So that's just low hanging fruit and we haven't done it in a while but I'm about to implement this system in our business. So take it from me, do it for yourself. It has worked for me in the past and we're about to start doing it again. So the only question is now, will we be able to keep up with that demand? The reason I put it off for a long time was really just because I honestly kind of forgot about it. I stopped needing clients. I stopped wanting clients. We actually put a hold on residential clients as a whole for quite a while. We stopped accepting residential clients for a couple of months but now we're in a position where we wanna grow and we wanna grow properly. So we've got a good hiring system in place. We did lose a bunch of staff but like I said, we are ahead of that curve. So we're just about to come out of that and yeah, we've learned from that mistake and we're ready to just close that chapter out and just grow fast. So we're gonna make up for lost time and get ahead and one of the ways we're gonna do that is by really doubling down on our referrals and our word of mouth and our organic marketing because that is the best way to grow a business. So yeah, we're gonna be doing that. We're gonna be leaving really nice cards and packages on clients' benches after every clean and I have no doubt that it's gonna produce results because it has done so in the past on a much smaller scale with a lot less, let's just say production value. So I have no doubt that it's going to do really well this time. So with that being said, thanks for listening to another episode of Self Made. If you enjoyed it, I would appreciate if you left a five-star rating and maybe this would be a good opportunity for me to put into practice what I was talking about for this whole episode. What can I give you as more of an incentive to leave me a five-star review? Okay, leave me a five-star rating on this podcast right now and I will give you five bucks. Take it or leave it. And another caveat here is that I'm only gonna give it to you in cash. So you have to find me out in public and if you see me out in public, come up to me, show me that you've left me a five-star rating on Spotify or Apple Podcasts and I will hand you over a $5 note and I'll high five you. So there you go. You'll also make my day. So if you wanna make my day and get five bucks, leave me a five-star rating right now. I'll give you a dollar for every star. So if you wanna leave me a one-star rating, that's fine. That's your prerogative. You can leave me a one-star rating. I'll give you a $1 gold coin and I won't give you a high five, but you'll get the coin. And yeah, hopefully after this episode, I'll see my ratings go up. That would be really cool. But with that being said, I will leave it here for today and I'll talk to you next time. Have a good one.