Hi, my name is Jason Sanders and I'm the founder and president of The Value Pages Group. I'm a six year veteran of the mortgage industry. As a mortgage professional, I have always been pro-active about continuing education, particularly sales education. Over the years I've spent tens of thousands of dollars on seminars, boot camps, coaching and mentoring. All that money was definitely money well spent, as it gave me a clear and concise understanding of what it takes to build a business and propelled my personal mortgage business from average to exceptional.
Over the years, I have picked up countless skills and tips on how to generate sales. However, the most powerful thing I learned was the concept of giving to get. In sales, there are hundreds of people standing in line to teach you how to ask for a referral. But all the asking in the world doesn't make people want to help you. It takes a specific skill set to get people to want to help you.
I was taught a very powerful system, where the business owner keeps in contact with his/her client base consistently on a rolling 45 day schedule. The key to this system is to never ask for anything, but to give something to your client base every time you speak to them. The things that you would give will probably vary based on your business, but I chose to partner with other local businesses that provided products and services to homeowners. I was able to convince fellow business owners to offer a discount on their products or services to my client base in return for the favor of being introduced to 200 or so potential new clients (my clients).
It was a win win win situation. Businesses that cooperated with me in this endeavor got the benefit of being exposed to new potential clients at no cost. My clients received discounted products and services for their homes from local providers. Ultimately, I won the most! I was able to introduce myself to, and raise my profile with, other business owners in my community. I was also able to offer items of value to my customer base at absolutely no cost to me. That meant that my clients began to look forward to my calls. I wasn't talking to them about their mortgage anymore. Instead I was talking to them about special offers that I had which could potentially save them money. Potentially is the key word. My whole goal was to provide the perception of value to my client base. It didn't matter if my clients had the need for the discounted services and products that I was exposing them to, because the most important thing is that they remember that I tried to give them something of value. That fact, created in my clients the subconscious desire to return the favor, thus fulfilling the universal law of reciprocity. I wasn't necessarily pursuing mortgages for my clients, but rather I was elevating my profile in their minds so that they thought of me when anyone else had a need that I could fill. Their subconscious minds recognized that I was a giver, and generated an agenda to give back to me.
This program was incredibly successful, and after some initial leg work to set up the infrastructure, only required me to contact 3 of my clients each day by phone (in order to contact all my clients in a 45 day period). What surprised me, though, was the amount of referrals and new business that I generated from the business owners that I partnered with. I got more from my partner businesses than from my own client base! The universal law of reciprocity applies to business owners the same as everyone else! The fact that I received more referrals from the business owners than from my own clients underscores the fact that the more you give the more you get. I had actually provided more value to my partners than my clients by volunteering to introduce my partners to my client base compared to offering my client base a 10%-15% discount on my partners services. Ultimately I was a victim of my own success. I generated more than twice as many referrals as I had expected. Since I wasn't prepared to handle that sort of volume, it soon became harder and harder to allot the time each day to make the 30 phone calls required to reach 3 of my clients. Another challenge with this type of system was that it was hard for me, as a single individual, to generate enough referrals from my client base to match all the referrals that my partner businesses were able to generate for me, which ultimately led to an erosion of their enthusiasm for the program. So I began to think about ways to use the concepts that I had learned in order to generate the same or better results in less time and be able duplicate my results for all my partner businesses.
In the mean time I had joined a traditional Business Networking and Referral Group (along the lines of BNI or LeTip). This group provided me with a lot of referrals, but I noticed a lot of turn over in the membership, and I also noticed that only certain types of businesses were consistently participating. Specifically businesses in the trades were rarely represented. I later learned that it was hard for business owners to manage job sites and retail locations and still be able to take time each week for a 2 hour networking lunch.
I began to envision technology that would allow businesses open and instantaneous communication between one another. As I conceptualized the networking and referral generating services that I wanted, I realized that businesses need a way to develop meaningful business relationships with one another in a way that will maximize their resources - their money, and more importantly their time. It was important to me that this group would allow any and every type of business to participate. It was obvious that face to face meetings are powerful, but I wanted my time to count for something. I imagined, instead of networking meetings, networking events that would meet real business needs and provide a fun and productive business environment. I'm proud to say that I think we got it right. We were able to develop a system that will harness the power of numbers to the business owner's favor, while still maintaining the intensity and benefit of a focus group or a mastermind group, and one that can be utilized and capitalized on with only minutes invested per week. After a lot of planning, consultation, and testing The Value Pages Group was launched on October 28, 2008.
Thank you so much for your interest in The Value Pages Group. Please check out the website, www.TheValuePagesGroup.com, for more information. We're looking forward to having you as a member!
Sincerely,
Jason Sanders
President
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