7 Ways To Get Customers for Free

I'm going to give you seven obscenely easy ways to get customers for free that you can Implement within this week these tactics have made me millions of dollars they actually work and I'll give you the real stats that I got when I used them in my business so you can use them in yours you should be obsessed with getting referrals and here's why referrals buy at higher percentages at higher prices they buy more often they buy more times and they're the most likely customer to yes refer you more customers and so if you have two

types of customers that you can potentially get one that cost you a lot of money and does none of these things and one that's free that does all of those things which would you prefer well obviously this one and independent of how big your business gets 30% of your business coming from referrals no matter you're at 100 million or 100,000 a year still grows your business by 30% and when it's that big and it's still free that's the type of stuff that compounds a business into Infinity versus having one that plateaus because not enough people

tell other people about it so the first one is when I looked at one of our portfolio companies we had a new sales gu who came in and crushed all of the records that had ever been done on that sales team and it was a very experienced sales team and I was like what is this guy doing does he have higher close rates on the phone and he didn't have higher close rates but for some reason he was able to get 30 to 50% more sales than everybody else I was like okay so how is

he getting more opportunities and so we got on the call we listened to all the all the scripts we're like he's not doing anything different and so we pulled the guy up we were like dude what are you doing and he said I don't know um after I close the customer I just say who else do you know who might also want this and I usually get like one out of three people to send me one or two other people and I just do that on every sale cuz I learned that uh in my last

job and when he said that it was like this big obvious duh that I'm sure was in the sop at some point for the sales team and of course people get lazy because they don't want to scare the sale away but by simply saying hey who else very clear who else do you know not do you know anybody yes no it's who else do you know who do you think would benefit from this who you'd want to do this with right cuz now you're actually asking them to solve a problem with their brain not make

a quick yes no answer which is what most people are just going to say no I don't know anybody let's move on and number one this isn't going to be your grandmother's you know referral video on hey you should ask for referrals I'm going to give you some very specific strategies on what to do how to say it in a way that'll actually get the likel that they do it pretty high now referrals are super valuable for a number of reasons one is that they compound with the business meaning whether you're $100 million business 30%

on 100 million or 30% on 100 Grand is still going to be 30% and so it's one of the most scalable ways to grow business overall the biggest companies in the world the vast majority of what they get is from word of mouth it's from people telling other people and in today's society where people are more able to share things faster and bigger across broader audiences and networks it matters more than ever it's so funny because people are like man why are my ads they were working now they're not everybody believes in positive word of

mouth they don't believe in negative word of mouth but both Word of Mouth happen because that's how this works number two referrals who come in are more likely to buy so they have a higher close rate they pay more they're willing they're more likely to buy buy a more premium version of what you have and they're also more likely to refer other customers so you get three spins on the money-making wheel from having referrals versus a cold customer so if you have let's say a recurring membership business that you have 10% monthly turn well you

can obviously always keep trying to decrease that turn but one of the other things that will always come out at any level so if you have a th customer you can you turn 10% you need a 100 new customers just to break even one of the very smart things that business owners do is they say okay well if I can get 10% of my customers to refer someone every month then I can offset that churn so that my business is stable and so by having a consistent way to get your all your customers to refer

you 10% you can make up for the 10% turn that you have and the ratio between your referral percentage and your turn percentage is you're going to be your stable at rest growth rate and so if you could have even 20% referrals on 10% then it means you're going to grow two to one and you will keep growing 2 to one no matter how big you get number one this is called the gift card play so I use this dur during holiday season so either you make up a holiday it's like hey it's my birthday

it's my wife's birthday it's the anniversary of the business or you go with the standard holidays it's Christmas it's Easter it's it's uh you know you can make it a spring thing it doesn't really matter you just have to a reason why to do the the gift cards now what you do with the gift cards it works especially well at Christmas is that you say that they are gifts for other people so you offer to your membership base and here's the here's how it works is that you want the amount for the gift card to

be equal to one of your core unit of service so something that you would normally give away for free so if you were an SEO agency you might have a $2,000 month service okay then it would be $2,000 is what the gift card would be now you're like wait $2,000 gift credit yes this is why it's so compelling if you had a you know a garage door fixing business and there's three elements to your service you'd make it the base level the cheapest level is what the gift card would be equivalent to so let's say

you have up to $1,000 of stuff and the lowest thing is 200 bucks then you make the gift card one or $200 now that step one is what you price the value of the discount the of the the gift card at the second element is what you make the discount for and the discount you want to be as aggressive as possible and so I recommend 90% or more discount on this so if I have a $2,000 thing 90% discount is 200 bucks you're like wait I'm not going to make money on this hold on the

point here is what would you already give away for free in terms of service or product in order to get in your customer probably a lot especially if you know that a referral is worth a lot of money and this is where it gets this is where the money this is where it gets magical okay is that what you do is you say Hey I'm going to be giving these gift cards away only to my existing customers and you can only give them to other people for the holiday season now I'm going to limit them

this is a key Point limit two per customer because that also gets everyone to buy two so that they refer you to customers and so that customer now buys two 90% off coupons that they have to give to two individual people that they can't use on themselves and when they make the purchase you say who are you want me to make this gift card out too and guess what happens there by making the gift card out to somebody you also capture the lead and so you get two referral leads that you get paid for this

is what I'm saying you get paid for the referral lead everybody else you have to pay money to get leads here you get paid to get leads all right big difference here so whatever if you want to get really nuanced about it you could just make it your cost to acquire customer but I think it's form more compelling to make it whatever your base unit is with the assumption that you know that you're going to be able to bring this person in and then upsell for the levels of service and then use that gift card

against that and so obviously we ran this in the brick and mor gym space which is where I started and so we would run say a $200 gift card which is about a month and you get 90% off so that people would pay 20 bucks for $200 gift card and now they look like amazing family members they're like hey I gave you a $200 gift card and you $200 gift card to my gym the person comes in with the card because you have their number so you can text them and follow up and then you

put an expiration date on the gift card this is very important is the expiration on the the gift card needs to be 30 days because you want them to use it as fast as possible this is an year long thing you need to put urgency to get the lead in the door so then you follow up and say hey Sandra G uh gave you that gift card uh let's get you in here and then when they come in you have that $200 thing at the base level you give the free month that you'd be happy

to do anyways and you get their card right their credit card or you can take that and say hey I think you'd be a best suited for the $2,000 package I'm going to take the 200 put it against that and boom now I took my $200 gift card put it against something that's 10 times more expensive they got 10 really 10% off and I still got paid 20 bucks for the lead and to make the sale and think about the math here so like if you have a big customer base and you sell two per

customer and you have call it 200 customers in your base uh and you get you know 30 of them to buy two cards each that's 60 cards that you give out and you're going to convert a huge percentage of those cards so you bring 50 of those 60 in the door and you're going to close a big chunk of those people and depending on the price point multiply that by your price take out the discount there you go so you don't lose money for three reasons one you're not paying cost to acquire the customer two

the amount that the thing that you're giving away as a discount is something you should be comfortable giv away that you would normally give away as a lead Magnet or a free level of service just to customer anyways and so when you have a normal way to get a customer you usually have some sort of promo and you have a cost to display that promo to people in terms of advertising you pay neither of those costs and then you make money because you're still getting paid by the customer to get the gift card and then

the third way that you can offset this is that you can still sell them into something that's far more expensive and so at the very worst case scenario you make a little bit of money on the discounted cash to give away an a level of service that you're comfortable giving away anyways so the second one is super tactical and it's a very specific point in the sales process and so when someone comes up to you and says hey I want to buy these Services can you give me a discount we've all heard this hey can

you make it a little less hey can you give me a homie hooko hey I know somebody do you think you could uh blah blah blah blah right so you say sure I'd love to just give me the name of three friends and I'm happy to give you the discount and so by doing that you can immediately say like because what happens they walk into a trap because they're they're going to like lean in as soon as you say oh I can totally give you that discount just give me the name of three friends and

then all of a sudden they're like oh it's like yeah I will happily do that if you do something for me and be amazed at how many times that actually works I'm like oh so if you just want me to introduce you to three friends for your service or whatever you'll give me this discount I say sure but we do that right now and you got to make the introduction and so by doing that you lock in three leads they get the discount that you might have been willing to give before I personally never discount

unless there's a change in terms and so either I change what I sell or they have to do something for me and so this is the second way which is they basically do some average iing on my behalf and so in exchange I give them the discount because I'm paying that discount is my cost to get those leads which I'm willing to pay for if someone's asking for a discount I mean again everything's going to come down to what is your cost you acquire customer normally and so if I figure I'm going to convert one

out of these three referrals then I would say 1/3 of CAC times three so 1X CAC your cost to acquire customer whatever it normally is is what I'd be willing to give as a discount on the main thing and as you become more experienced with this you start to get more and more predictable metrics and in the beginning I just want this to work you can start fine-tuning hey I'll give you a 100 bucks per referral or whatever now the second way that you can do this is that instead of offering the discount you can

offer more service that's an equivalent amount and the reason you do that is because let's say I charge $200 for my thing and it actually cost me $40 to deliver if someone says hey can I get a $200 discount I say I'll do you one better I'll give you $400 of service for free if you send me the person now the $400 of service to me only cost me 80 bucks but the perceived value of the $400 of service actually makes it even a bigger quote discount for them to get the thing and send me

the traffic and so it's the second version kind of 2A and 2B of that second strategy and if you want to hear how to take the referral process I just outlined and put it on steroids I have a course that goes with this book it's free calm down that's on my site at acquisition. comom you can click the leads course you don't even have to opt in for it and just go to the Affiliates chapter it's a 45 minute video I think is that breaks down everything that you can do to get more customers by

partnering with people who send you customers on a regular basis and number three is actually a permutation of number two but just done instead of on the discount you do it on the positive you say hey so you ask for $100 discount how about I do you one better I'll give you $200 of extra stuff and the reason I'm willing to do that as a business owner you don't say this this me explaining to you the $200 of service or stuff might cost me 40 bucks whereas giving $200 off the price is going to cost

me hard cost $200 and so I'd rather give you $400 of value for 40 or 80 bucks of cost so actually reduce what my effective discount is but I also increase the value for the Prospect and one of the nice valuable things here is that you're just encouraging a customer to use your service more or use your product more which is always a good thing and the fourth version of this is one that I used all the time and it crushed for me and so what I did was as soon as the sale was over

I would say hey do you to know how you can get this stuff for free and every time I did this when we'd have our sales 30% of our sales for every one of our promotions would come from people using the word of mouth the referral strategy that I'm about to talk talk about all right so it works really well and so at the end of the sale they already got you already got the card they already signed up and you say hey by the way do you know how to get this for free everyone

leans in they're like yeah of course I want to learn how to get it for free so now we're not talking about discounts we're talking about how do I get it free and so what you say is hey if this thing's 500 bucks you say for every person you bring in I'll give you a 100 bucks in cash and it was a real $100 cash check that I would give these people and so I had so many people I had have nurses or teachers who had h networks of people that they worked with on a

regular basis and said hey you want to do this weight loss challenge with me or whatever it was and so I would have one girl come ref me 10 people make 500 bucks and I would get 10 customers from this one person now that was obviously on the sale not on them making the introductions that was the big difference between the the first two and this one is I would say it was only after the fact after the sale that they'd be able to get the 100 bucks but that slayed for me I've tactically executed

this two different ways in my career way number one is that underneath of my contract I had all the names of the referrals always listed out there and that would remind me and my sales guys to ask for that referral and also know that that person would be attributed back to that customer remember I came from you know analog brick-and mortar I printed out contracts okay the second way is to just do the digital way which is hey introduce me right now with your friend which I'll show you the real tactic on that uh in

one of the one of the future ones because it's really good which leads me to number five which is referral at success and so the moment that someone has some big thing you just finished painting their house or you put their garage door in or you train their dog or you help them lose weight there's a moment of transformation that you have and a lot of times that's where you capture testimonials now for sure capture the testimonial but right afterwards they're amped they're feeling good they love your service they just experienced it when you say

hey you're amazing how many other amazing people like you do you know and usually they're like I don't know and then they start giggling whatever and you're like awesome can we take a picture together to commemorate the moment and then they say yes it's like let me give your phone so you take their phone you do a selfie and say hey let's take this picture who do you know that we can send this to that we can invite them in so we can do this with them and by making that ask and you do it

from their phone you text yourself through their phone with the picture of you the outcome and them so if it's you and the dog or you and the garage or just you and them skinny right you text them and say hey this is Sandra you should meet Alex and I used to joke around and like be like Alex is the coolest guy of all time he's he's the most amazing man you should to CU like they knew that I was texting as them um and they would get a laugh out of it and so mind

you this is where you have to have rapport with a customer if you don't have Rapport then this isn't going to work but for me this is why having it at the success moment it's like you've literally demonstrated the result in front of you to someone they know and then that person is making the introduction being like dude you've got to check this place out it's awesome they have the best crepes or they have the they totally fixed my garage and you said you were you were looking at at fixing it look how nice mine

looks whatever it is and that worked amazingly well to get referrals at the point of success and so you'll notice the through line here is that it each of these moments if someone ask for a discount boom you can get a referral if you want to get a referral you can add in a bonus uh or you can flip the discount into a bonus you can just ask them uh on a regular basis hey how do you want to know how to get this for free which slay for me you can do the version here

we're at the point of success you take the picture and you do the three-way introduction all these versions work obscenely well no matter how big your business is to get more customers in the door let's get the next one if you're watching on YouTube tell me which of the seven you're actually going to do not what you think would be cool or what you thought was neat which one can you do and Implement in the next 30 days number six the next one is a handwritten card strategy so here's how it works you pair handwritten

cards with in-person events or virtual events but it works especially well for in-person events and so if you have a member appreciation event or some sort of Workshop or something that you're going to be holding on a quarterly basis or whatever Cadence you have on I'd recommend doing this at least quarterly if you have especially a local business and so you invite the customers in and it doesn't have to be high budget it's just supposed to have some fun have some food it can be a pot lock whatever and so you invite all the customers

uh there and the way you do that is you write a handwritten card thanking them for their patronage and saying this is your invitation you're cordially invited to the quarterly or semiannual uh you know painters R R Us event whatever right and so you invite them to this event for you to appreciate them now you say PS This is key PS on the letter you say if you take a screen screen if you take a picture of this letter and you text it to a friend of yours they can use that to get into the

event they can have all the food and all the drink they want and they can come with you and if you want just so that I know them before they come in the door just do a three-way text with me and you can send that invite like you sending it to them and by doing that you can collect a bunch of leads and you say hey it's also all people are welcome and so they can then bring other people with them to your event and when we would do this you get 30 to 50% of

the room would be people who were friends and plus ones of the people who are coming to the event and then at the event all day long think about this all the people were there love you enough to show up to your event and so they're all talking about how awesome you are whatever the thing is and you're providing stuff to them you're giving them food you're giving them drinks you're ging entertainment you're walking around you're kissing baby shaking hands and so you seem like mayor of the town so you get great positioning and then

all you do is as you go one-on-one you say hey let's talk on Monday hey let's get a time set up blah blah blah blah and all you do is you set a shitload of appointments don't sell there just set follow-up appointments so that it's fun it keeps it chill and that way you can collect a ton of leads and after they've met you once in person they're not going to ghost you on the next thing and the likelihood they buy because their friendss already there they already literally consume something from you the reciprocity laws

that it's highest amount and so they're really likely to buy so uh two quick tactical things that I learned the hard way uh don't book these too far out like if someone's like hey I can do it two Eastern I'm like girl you're here right now I was like get in on Monday I was like let's coaching starts now let's go you know what I mean like I would like I always try to have that kind of like playful Rapport so I can get people in faster because obviously Interest wains really quickly and so you

have a very small period of time where motivation is super high and so we want to capitalize on that moment and after the event happens and I've already booked them I treat them like a normal lead so I'm going to still work them send reminders all the normal stuff you do number seven is the spouse request so this is a good one so if you have a service that a spouse can do with them so that could be like wine and paint night that could be like I said weight loss that could be therapy that

could be anything that somebody could do you ask them so basically it proact the obstacle so you get to be aggressive on it and say hey does your husband support you in this hey do you think this would help your husband out and or your wife out whatever and by doing that you say hey we have an amazing uh spouse program and we've actually seen that people who do it with their spouse and this is this is the key part of it is you want to have some sort of stat that's associated with it that

shows that oh people who do with their spouse are three times more successful and by doing that then it's like well you want to be more successful and so I would strongly like I don't use the word mandatory and I would even say this in the scripting I never say the word mandatory but unless your spouse has a reason like they their foot fell off or they're you know about to go to the hospital they're crazy if unless it's one of those reasons they should come with you because I think it's going to it's going

to it will be far more long- lasting whatever the transformation is it'll be far more effective whatever our our intervention is and you're going to have a much better experience and you'll have support here and at home which makes it way more likely that you'll win and the last one is a bonus one which is a friend of mine runs massive massive online challenges so this isn't just brick and mortar or just service businesses like it works for any business and you just have to think how can I make this work for my business not

it won't work for my business because I promise you that is The Voice of the loser like beating you into losers ship okay literally just in all messaging he had all he did for an entire campaign was simply remind people in every piece of content in every piece of messaging in every ad and every post that he did throughout the entire campaign was he just said hey be sure to bring a friend it's far more likely that you'll succeed you're going to love this if you do this together and he just said it every time

and at the end of his campaign and he's getting million plus customers when he runs these campaigns so massive massive massive scale 25 to 30% of the customers that came in from the campaign were from Word of Mouth were from unattributed sources and when he didn't do this it was almost nothing and so he attributed that big jump to making sure that he wo in the bring a friend that bring someone else that you're going to be more successful that you'd have more support you'll get faster results if you do it together and so I

would encourage you obviously these tactics that I just outlined give you when someone asks for a discount how to do it if it's the holidays you use the gift card if someone has a great success that's the moment if you want to get an event you use it to use as a referral event all of these tools are things that you can use at specific moments but the big overarching one is that if you know that you can generate about 30% of your leads and this is just what I've seen across our businesses by implementing

these strategies you get 30% more customers by just asking and actually weaving this in and not being lazy about it it's an obscenely easy way to get customers that are free pay more more stay longer and refer you more customers everybody want to get customers but ain't nobody want to ask for referrals