Today we’ll answer the question, How can you use relationship marketing to make more sales?

First I’m going to share one of my little secrets to maintaining business relationships, very easy to do but very few people do it. Then I’m going to teach you how to schedule the maintaining and growing of relationships and lastly, I want to help you be able to work with your most desired clients.

What is one of my secrets to relationship marking?

Here’s one of my secrets for relationship marketing…..there’s actually two methods that I use.

If I’m hanging out with a client (I also do this personally if I’m hanging out with good friends) and it’s a cool experience. Maybe it’s a charity event or a party or a cool restaurant or something unique, I’ll make sure that I get plenty of pictures that night. I’ll pick my favorite picture, maybe get a little photoshop, make it nice and pretty and I’ll get it printed and framed and send it to them. Nobody does this so it stands out.

Now that’s a little bit higher level than the other method.

The other method is even simpler. When I’m on an airplane, while my phone’s in airplane mode, I will scroll back as far as I can and look for pictures of me and someone else. Either I want to do business with or I’ve done business with or I haven’t spoken to in a while and I will send them the picture. I’ve done this where on one plane trip, I may hit 50 people, 80 people……I’ll find a picture and text them that picture….no words, just letting them know I’m thinking about them and remembering a good memory that we had together. This is something anybody can do.

No one does either of those things, but they are really simple. The text method takes you a few minutes. You get to feel good because you relive some of these memories and it shows them that you’re thinking about them.

How do you schedule the improving and maintaining of relationships?

A good friend of mine (there are other tools out there), but a good friend of mine created a company called AM Cards. AM Cards is a white label service that you can put your own graphics on (maybe graphics of the person you’re sending it to) and it will send a greeting card. They have a customer relationship database that allows you to schedule the sending of these cards. You can take your client database or your desired client database and plug them into this software and it will send out cards on a periodic basis (whenever you schedule them). This is a little different way versus an ad or a boring email. This gives you a different way to get in front of them and possibly get them to engaged with you.

One of the most powerful ways that I’ve seen this done, is if you’re watching people that you would like to work with….influencers or authors or whatever and they have something awesome in their life that happens, create a “congratulations” card. Example, if they just launched a best-selling book or they got recognized at a charity dinner or something like that…grab their social media picture, smack it in one of these cards and send it to them.

This software is really cool and I’ll share the link with you here in a little bit. This is a way for you to…one, automate that sort of thing and two, make your life a little bit easier. I don’t know about you but I can’t always stop by the store and get a greeting card, a stamp….right? This is something you can do right on your computer or even on your phone. It’s a powerful, easy and affordable way for you to maintain and grow new relationships.

How to work with your most desired clients?

All right, now we are going to dive deep on such an important topic….How to work with your most desired clients. There’s a few steps to this process. First, I want to give credit to the late and great Chet Holmes. Chet Holmes wrote a book called The Ultimate Sales Machine, and he described this concept called “The Dream 100.” Now a friend of mine, Dana Derricks, he actually wrote a book called The Dream 100 where he expands on this concept. The Dream 100 is the 100 people you would love to work with, 100 companies, 100 influencers, 100 authors, whatever you do, whatever you sell, whatever product or service that you have, what are 100 names or companies that you would love, love, love to work with? Both of those books, The Ultimate Sales Machine and The Dream 100, do a good job of helping you define or figure that out.

You should have a list of who you really want to work with and actually take the time to write it down. Who do you want to work with? What companies?

For me, there are certain stages that I want to speak on that I haven’t yet spoken on. I’ve shared the stage with Tony Robbins, Bob Proctor, Gary Vaynerchuk Richard Branson, Magic Johnson. I’ve shared the stage with all kinds of amazing rock stars, but there are stages that I have yet to speak on…. one of them is Tony Robbins stage. Why wouldn’t I want to be on that stage. I haven’t been on that stage….I’ve been on Grant Cardone’s stage and a lot of amazing individual stages. For me I think about “okay what would be dream clients for me?” “and “these are people that I know I could add massive value to and I know I could help them in their life” and “what are stages that I want to be on, what are companies that I want to work with” and I have a running list of what that looks like.

Do you? Because if you don’t then the likelihood that you’re going to pinpoint what it would take for them to want to work with you is very unlikely.

Think about “who” you want to work with, what does that look like? Is it a company or individual that you want to work with? Is there a certain event that you want to be a speaker for or a certain experience that you wish they would use your company for and think about it and dial in on what that would look like.

The next part, part two of this…is to see yourself actually doing that thing.

In my mind, I’ve ran it a thousand times where I’m backstage and Tony turns to me and he goes hey man, (in my head I’m thinking….I can’t do this..I can’t do it, I can’t do it...) but he says “hey congratulations on all that you’ve overcome, you’ve earned this, go get them.” I’ve heard that word for word many times from my eyeballs, not third party. Me walking up the steps and there’s like 600,000 people in the audience, right? I’ve seen that over and over and over and over. I felt the emotions of that…..so I’m just letting you know it’s going to happen. It’s going to happen because when you do this sort of powerful exercise of “wishing from,” not “of”, of seeing it as if it’s already happened and living the actual experience, you are drawing those events closer to you. This is something I’ve seen over and over in my life in many different capacities, personal and business.

You think about that person you want to work with or that company, what would that look like, who would you be talking to, what would they say to you, what would onlookers say to you if it were true and you building out that full vision of a memory of your future. You do that, you make the list of “who” you want….you start to create the experiences in your mind of actually working with them as if it’s happened already, as if you’re doing it right now and you’re gonna start to see some magic show up in your life.

I mentioned a few different resources above and one of them is my friend’s company, AM Cards. My friend is actually a coaching client of mine, he’s an amazing individual and his name is Curtis.

If you would like to learn more, here is the link to amcards.com. He actually allows you to use the service to send a few cards for free, so check it out. Free for you to check out, get a hang of the software and send some greeting cards which is pretty cool. Think about who do I want to send those to and click that link.