The Customer Connection: How to Get It

The primary purpose of a joint venture is to build your customer base by exposing your company to a wider range of targeted potential customers. However, the bulk of a company’s profits come from repeat business, which means connecting with your customers in a way that keeps them coming back for more. We have a few ideas on how to make and keep a customer connection that keeps on giving to your bottom line.

Communication is Key

If you truly want to connect with your current customers, the first step is to talk to them regularly. Greet them by name when they walk into your business and ask how they are doing. Learn the names of their children, pets or favorite sports teams. Ask what they think about your business and what they would change if they could. These regular exchanges don’t have to take a lot of time and effort, but they can make the world of difference in how often a customer chooses your company for his business.

Listen to Them

Customers will provide plenty of feedback about the quality of your business, and all you have to do is listen to what they have to say. However, active listening is a skill that is cultivated through use and practice. Active listening involves tuning into your customer’s words and repeating their meaning back to ensure there are no misunderstandings.

During the active listening process, you should be able to identify any potential needs your customer might have and provide effective solutions to those needs to enhance your customer’s satisfaction with your business.

Provide Incentives

Everyone likes to be appreciated, and your customers are no exception. Show them what their business means to you by scheduling periodic customer appreciation events. It might be coffee and donuts or a complete meal. You might also do a frequent customer mailing that includes special discounts only available to current clients or provide a special sale open only to those special people. If your cash is limited, get creative in your appreciation offerings, such as a special express line for current customers or a customer card that offers a discount after so many visits to your establishment.

Solicit Feedback

Some companies use customer surveys, while others take a less formal approach and simply ask customers what they like and don’t like about your business. You can have staff do follow-up calls after working with customers or send a mailing asking for customer feedback. To ensure you get a good response from your request, provide a small incentive with the survey, such as a discount on the next visit after the survey is returned. You might be surprised at how much you can learn about your company by simply asking the people who patronize it most.

Customer connections are the most effective way to build a loyal customer base and a healthy bottom line. By taking the time to forge professional relationships with the people who patronize your business most, you are more likely to keep those customers satisfied and coming back for more.

Christian Fea is CEO of Synertegic, Inc. A Joint Venture Marketing firm. He exemplifies how to profit from Joint Venture relationships by creating profit centers with minimal risk and maximum profitability.

To discover more Joint Venture Marketing Strategies join his free report on Joint Venture Marketing.

5 Must-Have Tools For Your Joint Venture

Joint ventures are an effective way to promote your business and build your customer base with little cost at the front of the endeavor. The savvy use of particular online advertising tools will provide even greater value for your advertising dollar.

There are many options in online marketing today, making the road somewhat challenging to navigate for business owners new to the idea of Internet advertising. We have five tools you should learn to use wisely to make the most of your joint venture.

Search Engines

Search engines are important if you want potential customers to find your website when they are searching for an item online. Search engines are completely free to use, and they provide a goldmine if you manage to achieve a high search engine ranking for your business. Getting that ranking involves a combination of submitting to all the primary search engines, as well as providing quality content that will push you up the SEO hierarchy.

Email Signature Files

This underused method of online advertising is extremely easy and effective. Whenever you send your email out to anyone, make sure your signature includes a four-line description of your business. The best responses will also provide contact information for your website and incentive for guests to visit. Incentives might include sign-up to your newsletter or a free report offer to generate audience interest in your business.

Autoresponders

Autoresponders are an absolute must if you want to ensure follow-up with every customer and potential customer who visits your website. You may be effective in responding to a customer’s initial requests, but autoresponders take the process a step further by making subsequent contact with the customer after the initial contact. This is the perfect way to reach customers who were too busy or cash-strapped to make a purchase at their first visit, or who might have lost your contact information or forgotten about your business.

Social Networks

While many business owners use Facebook to keep in touch with friends and family, they often neglect these social networks when it comes to effectively promoting their businesses. However, Facebook, LinkedIn and other social networks are a cost-effective way to expand your company’s exposure. When you use social networks in your joint ventures, you exponentially increase your exposure by utilizing the websites of your JV partners to promote your own company as well.

Blogs

Everyone has a list of favorite blogs they read regularly, and yours should be on the list if you are serious about promoting your company online. Blogs establish the creators as experts in their fields, and customers are much more likely to buy from a business that is an expert in the industry. Blogs should be updated two or three times a week to ensure a customer continues to tune in for the latest information.

Internet tools offer a wealth of advertising possibilities with few up-front costs with which to grapple. When you effectively combine resources with JV partners to reach a broader audience, you ability to expand your customer base, and your profits are nearly limitless.

Christian Fea is CEO of Synertegic, Inc. A Joint Venture Marketing firm. He exemplifies how to profit from Joint Venture relationships by creating profit centers with minimal risk and maximum profitability.

To discover more Joint Venture Marketing Strategies join his free report on Joint Venture Marketing.

Customer Loyalty: What it is and How to Build It

Joint ventures are an effective way to capitalize on the customer loyalty of more established businesses. After all, if customers are loyal to one company, they should be more than willing to transfer their loyalty to partnering companies as well, right? Maybe not.

While you can build a healthy customer base through JV marketing strategies, you will have to put in your own efforts when it comes to transforming first-time customers to loyal fans. We have tips to help you build customer loyalty in the new clients you get from your joint venture.

Communication

Keeping in touch with your customers is an essential component to nurturing a loyal, trusting relationship. Talk to your customers when they come into your business, whether it’s simply inquiring how they’re doing or how they think you are doing. Find out what their real needs are to determine if you are meeting them adequately. Relate to them on a personal level whenever possible by asking about their kids, pets or favorite sports team.

Written communication is another effective tool in building customer loyalty, with email blitzes and mail promotions to alert customers to special sales and new product lines. Birthday and Christmas cards to your regular customers also go far in building a healthy relationship that will keep those customers coming back time and time again. Monthly newsletters keep your business at the forefront of your customers’ minds, as well as keep them up to date on your latest offerings and promotions.

Customer Service Training

Customer loyalty originates at the front lines of your business, so make sure your employees are well trained in the fine art of customer service. Teach your staff how to go the extra mile for regular customers, how to handle customer complaints and when to cross-sell products and services. When your staff knows how to care for your customers properly, they will build a relationship with your clientele that will keep both employees and customers around for the long haul.

Reliability and Follow-Through

Your word means everything when it comes to customer loyalty, which means if you say a product will be in on Friday, it must be there for your customer to pick up. If a customer issue requires follow-through by you or one of your staff, make sure that follow-through is completed in a timely fashion. If a situation arises that prevents you from keeping your word, communicate this to your customer immediately to alert them to the problem and what you’re doing to remedy the situation. When customers feel like they can trust you in handling their business, they will stick around much longer.

Customer loyalty begins with your JV partner, but it doesn’t end there. Customers that have been loyal to your partner must see the advantages in frequenting your establishment as well. You must prove that your own company is equally deserving of the their loyalty by showing yourself to be reliable, trustworthy and helpful. Customer loyalty goes a long way in maintaining a good sales record and a healthy bottom line.

Christian Fea is CEO of Synertegic, Inc. A Joint Venture Marketing firm. He exemplifies how to profit from Joint Venture relationships by creating profit centers with minimal risk and maximum profitability.

To discover more Joint Venture Marketing Strategies join his free report on Joint Venture Marketing.

250 million in 11 months using integration marketing

What I’m about to share with you could seriously change your financial future in a positive way…

Wait let me rephrase that.

What I’m about to share with you, directly led to over $250 million in sales for one of my clients in less than 11 months.

Okay, I don’t expect you to believe me, and I know that’s a bold statement so let me give you little background.

I’ll also fill you in on my latest marketing project (these are the same tactics that I used in creating the $250 million in sales for my client) that I’m working on with Mark Joyner, the legendary marketer and business building expert.

I’ll keep this short as possible while explaining this very powerful, “integrated” way of marketing yourself, your idea or your existing product or service.

As you know, I specialize in doing joint venture deals. I connect supply and demand chains, create new relationships, products and services and ethically use underutilized assets of other people, companies, networks, etc as distribution channels to create, automated profit centers.

I know that’s a mouth full, and it may sound confusing, but stick with me.

A little background first…

You see, leveraging existing relationships and trust of other people can literally cut years off of the time that it would take you to create these relationships and trust networks by yourself.  It’s one of the primary tactics that top level marketers and  entrepreneurs, from one-man startups to international corporations have used to launch and expand their businesses for the last 200 years.

If you can tap into these types of existing relationships (and I’ll show you how),  the time it will take you to start earning more money from your business (or start a new one) will be reduced by weeks, months and years. This is a proven fact that I personally witnessed week in and week out since I (unknowingly) started doing joint ventures back in 1989 at the will age of 19.

You’ve been on my list, RSS feed or read by regular blog posts, so you know that I try to push out high-quality, joint venture based information on a regular basis to give you proven ideas, tips, tactics and strategies that I’ve personally used to create millions of dollars for my clients over the years. Hopefully, I’ve earned your respect and most of all your trust in directing you towards being more profitable in your business using joint venture marketing techniques.

Okay, so maybe you know this already. You know about the power of leveraging other people’s underutilized assets. You’ve heard how joint ventures can quickly turn into profits. But, I’m willing to bet that you have not successfully executed a joint venture relationship as of yet.

Let’s take this one step deeper. There is a subcategory to doing joint ventures that allowed me to “integrate” my clients services directly into the existing sales process of another company for no upfront, out-of-pocket costs and with very little risk. In fact, the entire process was set up with a phone call and one face-to-face meeting.

So let me help you take the next step and introduce you to the specific way of setting up profitable joint venture deals through a process called “integration marketing”. In short, integration marketing literally allows you to integrate or insert your existing product or service into the existing sales process of a related product or service.

Integration marketing techniques have been used by some of the world’s most famous companies including Microsoft, McDonald’s, HP and Wal-Mart,  but don’t let that intimidate you or send you down the ” this won’t work for me” highway. It works just as well for small start-ups and  entrepreneurs at home in their pajamas. The same tactics apply regardless of the size of your company. It works if you are one man or woman show or if you manage a complex international corporation with thousands of employees.

My latest project has connected me with the legendary marketer, Mark Joyner. Mark has written an entire book on the subject of integration marketing. He’s taken the concept and broken it down into bite sized, easy to understand concepts that make it easy to understand and apply these integration marketing tactics to your own business. He’s even come up with a method based on “predicted math” that you can use to ensure the highest probability of success when you apply these integration marketing methods.

My next post will give you specifics of how you can start increasing your profits  using these integration marketing techniques.

How a Joint Venture is Turning Texas Green

Energy production is expensive, and a heavy investment is required to build the plants necessary to turn fossil fuels into energy, such as coal plants. It is also expensive to manufacture plants that turn natural resources into energy, such as river dams and wind generators. However, thanks to the help of a recent joint venture of both U.S. and China companies, the largest wind farm in America will be developed in West Texas.

The Joint Venture Partners

A-Power Generating Systems Ltd. is a China-based company that specializes in distributed power generation, and it owns China’s largest wind turbine manufacturing facility. They have teamed up with the U.S. Renewable Energy Group and Texas wind power developer, Cielo Wind Power, to form a joint venture in West Texas. This JV will entail a wind farm project covering 36,000 acres of land and will generate approximately 600 MW of electricity per year.

Why Texas?

In a state that was made from the discovery and drilling of crude oil, clean wind will now be one of its largest energy output. Why did they choose Texas? It turns out that the largest state in the contiguous U.S. has enough sustainable wind in parts of West Texas to build the wind farms. Except unlike oil, the resource never runs out.

These choice conditions were ripe for China’s largest wind turbine manufacturer to bring their technology, expertise, and money to the U.S. The JV will largely be financed by China banks, but will also be financed in part by loan guarantees and grants from the U.S. government. The total cost for constructing the wind farm is expected to be $1.5 billion.

The result of this JV will be the largest wind farm in the country – and possibly the world with the size of wind generators used. The final count will be 240 wind-generating units, each capable of about 2.5 MW per year, which is the largest power output for any wind generator. Previous wind generator models typically produced an average of 1.6 MW. The total estimated power generation would be 600 MW per year.

Joint Ventures: Turning the World Green

This is an exciting time not just for Texas, but also for the world. With quickly depleting natural resources, the entire world needs to eventually switch its dependency of power consumption to renewable sources. With the superior wind generator technology coming out of China combined with the expertise and cost-efficiency of Cielo Wind Power, the new farm will be a litmus test for future wind farms with larger wind generators.

This is a big example of how technology meets expertise and availability to produce a winning product. Although your JV may not be a $1.5 billion project, you can still network and look for a viable JV partner who has the technology to meet your resources, or vice versa. Think big. Don’t be afraid to ask to join the ranks of major players. Make innovation a goal. And remember that the product of synergy between a winning JV is more than the sum of its parts.

Christian Fea is CEO of Synertegic, Inc. A Joint Venture Marketing firm. He exemplifies how to profit from Joint Venture relationships by creating profit centers with minimal risk and maximum profitability.

To discover more Joint Venture Marketing Strategies join his free Joint Venture Marketing Wealth Report.

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