5 Minutes with... John Jantsch

Most well-known for his Duct Tape Marketing brand, small business expert John Jantsch has a new book coming out this month, The Referral Engine: Teaching Your Business to Market Itself. Recently, executive editor, Daria Meoli spoke with Jantsch about attracting clients that will produce referrals and social media as a relationship building short cut.

Daria Meoli: What does “teaching your business to market itself” mean?

John Jantsch: I actually went out and interviewed people from about 50 or 60 companies that get a lot of referrals. They’re doing a lot of business by word of mouth. What I discovered pretty quickly was that the number one way that these organizations were successful in generating referrals had nothing to do with a super special cool way to ask for referrals; they just did stuff that made the experience of doing business with them so great that people voluntarily wanted to talk about them. That’s the idea behind teaching your business to market itself. How do you become the trusted resource? What are all the touch points? What about your culture and your people? The idea is to get your clients so connected to your business that they’d go out of their way to refer you, and not just because they like your product and it does what it says it does, but that they really want to see you succeed.

DM: How can business owners get started with motivating their clients to go out of their way to refer them?

JJ: It actually starts with attracting the right customers. I am a firm believer that most small businesses have a very narrow kind of ideal customer. But a lot of small businesses

get themselves in this situation where they say, “I’m an accountant, so, anybody who needs accounting, is our customer.” The reality is that most firms are set up to do a certain kind of work and to deliver it in a certain kind of way. For example, is the way you deliver your service more analytical or more touchy/feely? One way to help identify your ideal customer is to look to the most profitable customers you currently have. If you can figure out the common characteristics among that group of customers, you are on your way to identifying the makeup of an ideal customer for your business. Once you get that clear picture of who you can deliver value to, who you can create a great experience for, and really like doing business with, then you are in a position to build your business around attracting and delighting those clients. And once you do that, lead generation goes away because those folks will become your unpaid sales force.

DM: There are so many social media tools for marketing your business—Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Digg, etc. What advice would you give to a business owner who is trying to do more with social media and do it very well?

JJ: A lot of people look at social media as just a whole category of stuff they have to do. And what I try to get them to understand is marketing fundamentals have not changed.

It’s still about building their like and trust. Don’t look at Twitter and see a tactic. Look at it and ask yourself how you could use that to help you generate more like and trust in your market. Stop listening to the hype about it ‑ that’s the thing that kills social media for small businesses. All you hear about is what Britney Spears is doing with Twitter and

you know that’s obviously not relevant to you. A lot of small business owner go to chamber of commerce mixers, association events and trade shows and they meet lots of prospects. After you collect the business cards, instead of firing off an e-mail or leaving a voicemail, find those folks on LinkedIn, find them on Facebook, and find them on Twitter, and follow them. Start communicating that way. Not only is it no more work to do that than what you’ve been doing, but I believe that social media allows you to actually create a much faster and deeper engagement. There are so many tools there that make it easy for you to continue to communicate with them. If you send an e-mail off to somebody and that goes off into the void, you don’t even know if they really read it. If you connect via social media, you can immediately start seeing that they went to the USC football game this weekend because they’re alumni, for example. You’re gathering information on  that prospect that they’re willingly sharing. That makes you a heck of a lot smarter than you would have been had you waited till the next time you bumped into them at an event to make a connection.