Small Business Marketing Idea Continued - Endorsed Offers Part 2
Compensating Your Endorser With Your Services
For this type of agreement, you compensate your endorser in exchange for permission to use their endorsed case study in your marketing.
To be frank, it's rare that anyone will ever ask you for compensation. In over 12 years of using endorsed offers, I've only been asked once to compensate a client. To be even more frank, while the client was a very nice person, he was also a notorious cheapskate. In any case, I did compensate him by doing a free critique of one of his marketing pieces in exchange for the endorsement letter.
Personally, I've never asked anyone whose service I've endorsed for compensation in any form. I believe that if someone has done an exceptional job for me, I should provide the endorsement for free, or not provide it at all.
Trading Endorsements
For this structure, you simply work out a deal with another business to endorse each other’s services. For example, a financial planner and a CPA can recommend each other's services to their clients.
In addition to bringing in highly qualified leads for both businesses, it provides added value for your clients. I know that when my son was born and we were looking to set up a fund to pay for his college education, I would have welcomed a strong recommendation from my CPA. In fact, I called the CPA I was using at the time and his reply was, "My father is thinking about getting into that. Can you wait a few months?" This didn't do much to cement my relationship with my CPA. But then, he didn't have a chance to benefit from this program!
Compensation By Providing A Valuable Gift Given By Your Endorser To Their Customers
This is one of my favorite techniques. It allows you to make your endorser look great to their customers or clients while bringing in a truckload of highly qualified leads for your business. Since it provides a winning situation for everyone involved – your endorser, their customers or clients, and you – it's rarely turned down by the endorsers you approach.
Here's how it works. You create a one or two page letter telling your endorser that you would like to give their customers a free gift of your services. And that it will be presented in a letter explaining that your endorser has "purchased" it as a way of showing their gratitude to the customer. You also include a brief explanation on how this will make your endorser's customers want to do even more business with them.
Small Business Marketing Idea | 