Let's Get It Started

Happy New Year! I am back from blogbernation. When I get called out by our social media heartthrob and one of the massage world’s preeminent bloggers, it’s time to get back to the salt mines. My goal this year is to come up with enough cool, innovative, clever, practice-building resources through this blog that I receive threats from people: “Stop it! I can’t take any more business. Quit helping me succeed!” As you may have heard, ABMP is celebrating its 25^th anniversary in 2012. So I am going to post at least 25 blogs and offer at least 25 good ideas about developing your practice. You can be the judge about the quality. Time to build your 2012 Super Fantastic Client Building Machine. In my last post in December (“What’s in Your Wallet?”), when discussing what prudent therapists might carry in their wallets, I included the following:

A referral card—do you have a system to reward referrals from your existing clients? If not, do it. Now. I’m not kidding. I’m waiting … okay, we’ll build this in the next blog. You’re off the hook for now.

You’re no longer off the hook. Today, we start with a simple exercise—handing out cards. Not your business cards— referral cards. First, Arts & Crafts. Yippee! Go in your dad’s closet and get an old shirt to use as a smock (okay, not really—just reminiscing about art class at Silverside Elementary). Actually, you’re going to either a) craft these yourself by hand or b) design them on your computer. On the front side, you’ll have an invitation and your contact info. On the back, you’ll put a sticker that identifies who you gave the card to (your sales person). Then, ask that person to hand out your cards, and for every 5 (or 3 or 10, you decide) you get back, you give your sales person a free massage (or a discount, or extra time, or a Rolex, or whatever makes sense for you). The most cost-effective way to do this is to probably print out multiples of the card’s front side on quality paper, and either hand-write numbers on the back or use colorful stickers (with numbers, or you can write the numbers on). If you go the colored sticker route, make sure you have at least a few different shades so you can have multiple people on your sales force. Also, you probably want to set a time limit on the handing out and returning, so you can gauge how this is strategy going (and add more peeps to your sales force, if necessary). Alright—time to get to work. Let me know what you think, and feel free to add to the idea. Next post: Let’s Make a Deal. Les Sweeney is on Twitter. Follow him at @abmp_les.