Making Prospective Clients Line Up To Give You Money

by Greg Milner on Friday, November 16th, 2007 at 7:47 pm

Here’s a concept that’s completely foreign to most salon and spa owners:

Make it difficult for prospective clients to give you money.

Okay, I can hear you thinking: “He’s really gone nuts now.” Bear with me for a moment. There is method in my madness.

Most of you reading this spend a large part of your lives in business tearing your hair out with the constant battle to get clients IN the door… so the last thing you’d want to do is make it hard for them, right? Wrong.

The very reason you’re finding it hard to get clients in the door is precisely because you make it too easy. I’ll explain.

For our Inner Circle marketing, coaching and sales training membership program, we deliberately make it difficult to join. As anybody who has managed to join in the past year or so will know, you must first complete our Inner Circle Survey and Questionnaire about your business, your goals, what marketing you’ve done, how you feel about the results, how you feel about your competition, etc etc. (You can do this online here, or you might have received the survey in one of our newsletters and faxed it back to us.)

We get upwards of 100 of these surveys every month, and rising rapidly, from all over the world.

Once you’ve completed the survey, you might have to wait a few days. Then you’ll get a phone call, either from me if you’re in Australia or New Zealand, or from our representatives in the USA, Canada, the UK and Ireland. That phone call is so we can assess whether we want you as a Member. How you speak on the phone, whether you’re happy being a technician and would rather keep it that way, how driven you are to succeed, what action you’re prepared to take to achieve your goals, do you want to get off the tools and start being a business owner rather than a technician, and much more.

These interviews can take up to 30 minutes. We make it clear during these interviews that we expect and insist Members to at least double their sales in the first 12 months.

We also make it clear that, after the initial 30-day Free Test Drive, we’ll review the case and then decide if we want to keep the new Member in the group. If they’ve missed a scheduled coaching call, if they’ve promised to take action and then excused themself because they had to… wash their hair that week…well frankly, it’s time to cut them loose.

And we also make it clear that you can resign your Membership at any time – but you can never come back. And we mean it.

At the Road to Riches Salon Marketing Conference right here in Perth this week, more than 50 salons applied for Membership. We assessed the applications, and declined several. The following day, one actually returned his membership kit to our office having changed his mind – and then rang back 24 hours later, telling Jill

‘We talked about it late last night, and realised we’d made a terrible decision in returning the kit! Can we please get back in?’

And this from a successful salon with sales of $20,000 a week. Fortunately we had not yet processed their membership application.

Now, we make it hard to join Inner Circle for two very good reasons. One, because I believe in controlled growth - there is no way we could handle an unlimited rise in new Memberships, due to the amount of individual effort, expertise and sheer hard labour we put into each and every new Member in the first few months.

Two, because it’s good marketing. If we simply opened our doors to anyone and everyone, what would that signal to the hundreds of Members we coach on a daily basis?

Actually, there’s a third and even more important reason we limit Membership. And that’s simply that we reserve the right to do business with whom WE choose. Yes, we decide who will be our customers, not the other way around.

It is a deliberate, and very successful policy. Often, salon owners accepted into the program after their interview are shaking with excitement, gratitude and a thrilling sense of optimism. And rightly so. It IS thrilling to finally have the tools, and the advice and on-going support to literally change your business and lifestyle so dramatically.

So how can YOU apply this strategy in your own business? Well, it comes down to claiming the high ground – and making a deliberate policy of

instructing your clients in how you insist they behave.

In the complete Essential Salon Owner’s Marketing Toolkit that all Inner Circle members receive, there is a very carefully-worded New Client letter which specifically sets out the terms and conditions under which you expect your clients to behave. It’s called You and Us – a Beautiful Relationship, and it says clients are expected to be on time, they can expect to pay a cancellation fee should they cancel with less than 24 hours notice, they will be billed the entire fee should they simply fail to turn up, etc etc. In return, you will guarantee they’ll never be kept waiting more than five minutes (if so it’s free), you will expect to be told if your client is at all unhappy with their treatment etc etc etc.

Of course, you don’t set everything out on paper. Much of the positioning you can implement is unspoken, but equally powerful. Many salon owners complain they can’t get off the tools because their clients refuse to be served by another staff member. Well, do this: when you want to work ON the business rather than IN it, sure, turn up at the salon. But in corporate-style civilian clothes, NOT in uniform. It tells your clients – without a word being spoken – that you are NOT there to be on the tools.

Another tool to employ is a well-structured Membership Program. In the Inner Circle kit, there is a famous Membership letter that by my rough reckoning has generated hundreds of thousands of dollars in sales, just for the relatively-few Inner Circle members who have used it. But it not only generates up-front cash… it deliberately and carefully helps you divide your clients into the ‘members’ and ‘non-members’ – another strategy to get your clients eager to enrol.

There are literally dozens of ways, techniques and strategies ANY business owner can employ to position themselves in such a way that customers actually jostle for a place in your business.

And it’s critically important that you do so. Otherwise you’ll forever be dancing to your clients’ tune.

Who runs your business… you, or your clients??

A post by Greg Milner

The odd idea, a bit of prodding, a nudge here and there, a little fun, and the occasional dose of brutal reality. Greg is co-founder and CEO of Worldwide Salon Marketing, a writer, direct response marketing consultant, specialist marketing systems adviser and coach.