Background
One of my customers has a business that serves clients from the manufacturing industry. They sell a cleaning kit that is used for CNC machines. Typically, in the process of manufacturing, CNC machines tend to get quite dirty because of all the cutting, drilling, and all that work that happens on them. This often results in the efficiency of the machine being reduced, some parts of a machine sometimes breaking down due to dust and dirt, and so on. The kit that my client sells helps their customers to keep the machines spanking clean with very little effort and thus keep them running efficiently. The product is very good, but not very many people knew of it, so it was important to get information about the product to as many potential customers as possible.
To hire a sales force and get them to go and physically meet people and eventually, get sales, would have taken a lot of time and effort, and also a lot of money.
Solution
After understanding the way things work in the manufacturing industry, we came up with a unique solution.
Service engineers who work with the manufacturers of CNC machines go and visit factories that have CNC machines for service calls. A service engineer make between four and seven calls to different manufacturers every day.
So I suggested that my client should speak with service engineers and give them a small sample kit, and ask them to use the kit to also clean the machine they service (it’s quick and easy). The end customer who sees the result will obviously be very pleased with the service engineer for going above and beyond what is usually expected of them. At this point, the service engineer can give the customer the remainder of the sample and say “I got some free samples and had a great experience using them with other customers too. You can have the remaining sample. Try it for a few days and if you like it, here’s a coupon code that you can use to buy the kit online.”
The CNC machine owner tries the product for a few days and loves the result. They then go online and buy the product using the the coupon code that they’ve received from the service engineer. Since their machines need to be cleaned regularly, they purchase the product regularly, using the coupon code to get a discount.
Behind the scenes, the coupon code is linked in to the service engineer, so my client knows that the referral for a specific order came from this particular service engineer. A referral fee is generated for that service engineer in the system,and the service engineer gets an email notifying them that a sale has been concluded using their coupon code, and the commission they have earned for the sale.
The entire system is automated and does not need any maintenance. My client’s team only needs to set up a service engineer in the system once.
Result
The service engineer can log in to the site and look at all their referral sales, the commission they’ve earned, how much has been paid out to them, and how much yet remains to be paid.
The end customer who buys and uses the product is happy because they get a discount.
The service engineer is happy because all they need to do is tell a customer about the product once, and after that, they get an ongoing commission for every future purchase made by anyone who uses their coupon code. It is a nice ongoing side income for the service engineer.
My client is happy because they’ve now got an entire army of people selling their product enthusiastically, and they don’t even have the overheads of paying salaries; they only pay a commission when a sale is concluded.
It works well for everybody.
