Recruiting vs Selling Part 2

As I said in the last post, I believe when starting your business you should focus on building your customer base. The bulk of the customers that you gain will most likely be your friends and family. These are the people that you should have written down for your list of coffee drinkers. Since these people already know you, it shouldn't be too hard to do business with them. Because these people are around you, they'll always be able to get to you when they want more product.

After you get through the warm market and enter the cold market, things get a lot more tricky when it comes to managing customers. Someone in the cold market is a person who does not know who you are. I myself still continue to build customers in the cold market, but I gotta tell you it is tough. The hard part isn't finding people who enjoy the coffee and want to buy, it's maintaining them over the long term.

Because the customers from your cold market aren't exposed to you on a regular basis, they may not think to purchase more product from you when they need it. There have been plenty of times where I've called up a cold market customer to say "hi" and they start telling me how they've been wanting to talk to me about buying more coffee. Or there's the case's where I've had customers say "Hey Chris, I've been looking for you everywhere, I want more of that coffee". "Looking for me?" I ask "You could have just called me or ordered from my OG website". They than tell me how they keep forgetting to call or they don't feel comfortable about placing orders online and would rather buy directly through me. This is where recruiting becomes helpful.

I think of my recruits not just as people who are in my downline, but as an extension of me. They are a way to reach customers of mine, who don't come into contact with me. With this understanding, I've developed my own strategy for finding recruits. What I'll do is ask a friend if they will do me the favor of passing out some coffee samples to their friends and family. In most cases they have no problem doing this because they see it as just doing me a favor.

In most cases they get back to me and tell me how a few of their friends and family loved the coffee. However, I've found that very rarely will these people make an actual purchase simply because they don't have a clue who I am. I ask my friend how they would feel about collecting the money for the coffee themselves vs me making the sale and getting the money. At that point I take them through the steps of getting signed up. I've helped them develop a customer base before even getting into the business.

That is the advantage of recruiting to me, reaching more customers in the cold market.