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joint ventures &news &referral system Martin Lee on 11 Oct 2006 12:42 pm

Referral System

Here’s a question from one of my readers:

I work for a driving school and i am going to start implementing Jay’s teachings

: Referral system

: Risk free guarantee

: And joint ventures

My question is this: I want to give all local business in the area postcards, that endorse us as the best driving school. And for every client we get, we will pay them �10.

The biggest problem i can see is that, business owners may feel that we will rip them off and not pay them the money. How do i get around this hurdle?

Also joint venture partners: finding people who can’t drive but want to learn is not that easy because there isn’t a list you can rent, or clubs or associations..

The only JV Partners i can think of are:

Colleges/ students- who don’t have much money

Estate agents / (Realtors)

Here’s my reply:

Given that your potential customer falls in a very targeted group, it is unclear to me how an untargeted local business would actually give out your postcards. If it’s only to a select group of their clients, will you be helping them to narrow down their list?

And getting them to endorse you as the “best” driving school might be a tall order, since you can’t really quantify that.

Instead of trying to “hit” on all local companies, you might want to narrow down to companies with clients that have a closer profile of people that you are looking for.

You also mentioned your concern about skeptical companies worrying about being paid. Most incentive based referral systems work because both parties have a prior working relationship, e.g. existing customers, etc.

As the �10 referral fee is quite low anyway, why not try this approach?

For example, you identified college students as people who might be interested to learn driving. Are there any local stores at your place that serve mainly this age group?

Approach them and tell them something along this line, “I represent a driving school and would like to give you something of value that most of your customers would find useful. At no cost to you, you can use it to enhance your relationship with your existing customers and also use it to bring in more customers.

Here’s a booklet of driving lesson coupons with values ranging from �10 to �50 that you can use for your promotions. One way of using them is to offer a �10 coupon whenever someone makes a �10 purchase.” And so on…

In this way, there’s absolutely no risk to the local business in doing a joint venture with you. To take it up even further, you can also request them to provide similar coupons to you that you can offer as bonus to the students at your driving school. In this way, you will be driving new customers to them and also giving something of value to your students.

Last point. Does your school offer refresher driving lessons or advance driving lessons (possibly with some defensive driving elements)? If there is, you can also try setting up JVs at places where people buy cars!

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