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Firstly: …. I’d like to explain how and why this Business to Business Referral Club came about.
All of my working life I have worked as a plasterer/plastering contractor. Firstly, almost exclusively commercial work; Sites, offices, warehouses, hotels etc, until I decided I was getting a bit old for that and moved mainly into private/domestic work for the remainder of my plastering life.
One of the most common questions I would get asked was, did I know of other trades and services I could ‘trust’ and recommend, as finding reliable tradespeople or service providers is very much a guessing game for most people. I got asked so many times that I started to carry around printed A4 sheets of paper with the names and telephone numbers of my most trusted contacts around in my van, and would give them to my customers, either when they asked, or when they paid me at the end of the job.
When I first got a website for the business back in 2,000 I put a ‘trusted contacts’ page on there with the same names and numbers so that visitors could click through to the page to get those trusted referrals.
(There was no charge made, it was a free service that I was glad to give to present and potential customers).
Several years ago I had to give up manual work and I found myself spending a lot of time learning the in’s and out’s of internet marketing and how it can seriously benefit ‘Local Businesses’ especially. That’s when It occurred to me that Business Referral Clubs have been around for some years now and that business people/self-employed etc would be willing to pay a membership fee to enjoy the definite benefits of such an exclusive membership.
I also noted that most B2B referral clubs were closed shops to ‘members only’, but that if the member details were opened up to the public, they could search the contact details with a great deal more confidence than the usual ‘old-school’ referral web-sites – it would be a Win-Win situation for both the business members, and the public, who are often left wondering just ‘where’ to turn to get the best services out there.
As you’ll see when you read on, this is an exclusive membership, I won’t be accepting every Tom-Dick & Harriet into the fold.
It is hoped that almost ‘all’ of the subscriptions will come from personal recommendations from existing members who have a vested interest in keeping the membership as clean and trustworthy as possible because their contact details will be displayed at the head of their recomendee’s bio-page. But if you are reading this and you operate a quality-driven business yourself, dedicated to giving the best possible service to your customers, then you’re more than welcome to apply by simply ‘asking’ via the Contact page and I will get back to you with details.
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