Building Your Business Through Referrals and Repeat Customers

August 3, 2017

How often do you reach out to the business of one type or another in hopes that you will at least be able to reach one of their representatives in order that you can receive the answer to your inquiry, but instead of actually being able to talk to someone you are forced to leave a voice mail? I think that we could all agree that in today’s society that more than not often tends to be the norm and not the exception to the rule. The message normally goes something like this. Thank you so much for taking the time out of your day to call us. We are very sorry, but we are unable to answer the phone right at this time. Please leave us a message and we will try and get back to you at our earliest possible convenience. Thanks so much for calling.

I have been managing a St. Louis screen printing and embroidery company for a long time now. I am well aware of the fact that there are many components to running a successful business is each separate link needs to be able to stay intact from the very beginning of the order till the time our customer shows up at our door to pick up their finished product. That being said, the most important single component is the ability to communicate with our potential customer. Everything starts off and depends on that. It doesn’t matter how good you are at whatever it is you are at custom T-shirt printing if you never end up getting the job in the first place. A significant percentage of our overall sales is from either repeat digital T-shirt printing customers or from good referrals. It’s been our experience over the many years of doing this that it is much easier to work with someone whom we’ve worked with before that it is somebody that we have no previous history with. This is because they are already extremely confident on our ability to process the order correctly and in a timely manner. We do not have to try and sell them on ourselves for our abilities. The overwhelming majority of our repeat buyers found us and decided to give us a try because we actually took the time out of our day to answer the phone and talk to them. We did not force them to leave a message and then eventually check our voice mail when we got around to it, and then call them back. If that would’ve been our protocol and course of action they could have likely just got on the phone and call one of our St. Louis screen printing and embroidery competitors.

In today’s business environment, it appears that voice mail is the most common means of communication when talking to another person. A person actually answering their telephone seems to be a thing of the past. We believe there is a lot to be gained by conveying professionalism. Give us a call and see if you don’t actually reach a live human being. We definitely want to talk to you! In spite of the fact that everything in our world seems to be digital, we are of the opinion that some things are better off being done old school.