Jeff - My opinion regarding your question: Business Network International. It has kept us in business during our first year. It will cost $430 up front and $12 per week, but I get 1 - 5 jobs a week through this networking group. There are varying opinions about BNI…I highly recommend it. I’m considering placing two salesman in other groups in our area. If I do this, my monthly cost for referrals (actual work to be conducted) would be around $260/month. This is just the BNI cost.
Google Maps is free, and you don’t have to have a website. Just ad your business info.
Yes, in Quick Books I set up a different “class” for each form of advertising or customer acquisition and indicate where each job came from as I enter the week’s jobs. You can then go to “reports,” then “company & financial” and then “profit & loss by class.” This gives you a report on the dollar volume from each form of advertising, over the time period that you have selected.
Yes, there is overlap. I just use this to indicate where this year’s jobs came from. For next year’s cleaning they will show up as “repeat customers.” It’s not a perfect system, but is pretty useful in comparing how each form of advertising is currently performing in relation to the other forms.
Our local Yellow Pages has started an on line version of itself. It’s quite smart for them as they get alot of traffic and so now if you have your regular listing with them in the hard copy book. you also can get an online listing that is really nice. My buddy got one and they actually produced a professional video of his company showing his services along with the pics and video he supplied them. This all links to his web site and of course increases his Google rating significantly. I’d say it’s the future of the YP’s. To increase ones rank in Google search…
Hadn’t thought of that, but it might work (you can set up custom fields under the “additional info” tab. You would just need to figure out how to get this info to show up in a report).
I do it on the “Create Invoices” screen. At the top of the page, click on the arrow by “Class,” then “Add new,” which allows you to enter the various sources of new customers. Then as you create each invoice, use your new drop-down class menu to select where the customer came from.
Then to do a report, go to Reports/Company & Financial/Profit & Loss by Class and select the time period you want to cover.
