Clover Leaf Your Way to Bigger Business

How many marketing opportunities do you utilize that can easily add an additional 20% to your bottom line? Whatever your answer, it's not enough! This issue of ShuBee Business Tips, we're taking advice from ShuBee founder, Steve Stone on a simple and inexpensive, yet highly effective way to grow your business.

Steve explained a technique called "Clover Leafing," which he used to gain new customers when he was operating his plumbing/HVAC business. The concept is simple; after he would finish a call with one of his clients, he would go to the house to the right and left of his service call as well as to the house across the street (making a clover leaf pattern) to drop off a leave-behind advertisement such as a door hanger, business card, magnet, etc. with his contact information. By taking these simple steps to introduce his company to potential clients, he guaranteed himself new sales every day! While the effects of a campaign may not be as immediate as some other forms of advertising, its long-term impact can help grow your business exponentially.

Using a quality leave-behind in a technique like this does several things:

• It introduces your company to new potential clients
• Promotes word of mouth advertising - the best kind
• It keeps potential clients out of the yellow pages and away from your competition's ads

How effective can clover leafing be? Well, let's do some math...

The average service-based business has three trucks. Each truck serves five calls a day with an average ticket of $280.00. Each day's business comes to $4,200.

Assuming that you're not taking calls on the weekend (just to keep things simple), that's about $21,000 in business per week or just over one-million per year.

Not too shabby. Now let's add a clover leafing campaign into the mix.

Let's say that all your drivers reach out to just three potential new clients after their service call using this clover leaf technique. If each service team can gain one new client per day, that's an additional 15 calls per week. Based on the same $280 average ticket price, total sales for the year just went up $201,600!

Let's say my math is off and your return rate is only half of what we've projected here... Couldn't you stand to gain an additional hundred thousand or so?

To help make the program even more effective, consider adding an incentive to your customers. Advertisements that utilize customer savings are generally three times more effective than ones that are simply an advertisement for your business. Consider offering these potential new clients a discount for responding to your clover leafing campaign by waiving their travel charge on this call since you're already in their neighborhood.

Use promotional items you already have in hand such as your business cards, door hangers or refrigerator magnets.

Make this program worth while for your employees as well by offering a spiff. Let's say you include a $50 bonus to your drivers for each new customer they pick up using this clover leaf campaign. This may sound like large spiff to pocket, but if you figure that on average it takes around $230 of advertising to close a new client, wouldn't it be nice to pick up a few up for $50 or so?