How to reach out to wellness professionals – DSP 73

Getting together with other wellness businesses seems like a slam dunk for float centers. Or at least it should be. Floating seems to have a special sort of synergy with things like yoga, massage, acupuncture, or what have you, but that doesn’t always mean that other wellness practitioners are going to be your greatest advocates. How do you turn that acupuncturist across the street into your biggest advocate?

Graham and Ashkahn have tried it all and worked closely with tons of businesses in joint marketing ventures as well as referral programs. They share what has worked best for them, and some of the surprises they’ve found with stuff they thought would work that just totally didn’t.

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Transcription of this episode… (in case you prefer reading)

Graham: Today’s question for you is, “How do you form good relationships with other wellness professionals in your city?”

Ashkahn: It’s harder than you think.

Graham: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Ashkahn: It’s harder than I thought, at least.

Graham: And at the same time, I would say also easy.

Ashkahn: Also exactly, is how I’d say it. So, here’s what I found.

Graham: Here’s the scoop that Ashkahn found.

Ashkahn: Here’s the scoop that I found is … this is one of the first things we did actually, before we even opened our shop.

Graham: Yeah.

Ashkahn: We went around to the businesses in our neighborhood, so walked down the street, walked in kind of a mile radius to all the different massage, acupuncture sort of places.

Graham: The literally 200 places that were in a mile radius of Float On in Portland, Oregon.

Ashkahn: Yeah, and then I also made a spreadsheet of the most popular spas and stuff like that in the city of Portland. Not just spas, like MMA gyms, things like that, and tried to go say hello to them too.

And I guess it was like really the shotgun approach. We really went for the shotgun approach, and it turned out that was not as effective as you would think. Getting just your brochures somewhere, something like that, really seems to … there’s just a lot of noise out there. Like the places that will but like, “Yeah, just put your brochure on that thing,” typically have hundreds of brochures on that thing. And that’s a little different than the kind of actual strategic partnership you may make with one or two businesses that you actually want to work with in a more serious way.

Graham: Yeah, and I guess my big … well, I have several big takeaways, first of all. So, my first big takeaway from the time spent going around other places was kind of what you said. It was almost like the more that we tried to really enter into this really conventional, just like business-to-business relationship with people, the more it tended to not do as well.

And that was even really down to really formal kind of exchanges. We actually got in touch with one of the owners or a manager, and they’re like, “Okay, you can put brochures at our place. We’ll put brochures at your place.” Even things like referral systems where it’s like okay, if you send over four or five people to float, then you get free floats for that month. Or we can give you a little kick back, and we were really playing around with how do we make these normal business-y relationships that other businesses manage to form and that help them.

And we got a lot of our ideas just from reading kind of more traditional business blogs and business books, but what we found was almost the more professional and the more set you tried to make these relationships, the less that it A) continues in the future. Most of them fell apart after less than a month. And B) the less you get out of them, which I thought was interesting. And so, for us it’s been really largely those informal and much deeper relationships that have produced the biggest amount of floaters coming in, and also just I guess the best feeling on our side.

Ashkahn: Yeah, it’s really like, I almost feel like it’s mostly dependent on whether someone in the company you’re working with, the owner or some of the practitioners there actually are really interested in floating, and want to float. Otherwise, they just don’t seem to care, and it just gets lost in a lot of things. And part of that kind of shotgun approach of talking to a lot of people is you find every once in a while that person who’s like, “That sounds awesome.” And at that point, everything becomes way easier.

You almost don’t need any formal system or anything when someone there really is into floating, they’re just going to want to come try it, and they’re just going to start naturally telling their customers about it. And that’s probably the most effective things we’ve had, is just literally, we just clicked with some sort of massage person in town who was really into floating, and they just sent a bunch of their customers over our way because they were really passionate about how much they liked floating. And when people asked us about massage stuff, we were like, “Hey, you should try this massage place. This person is super into floating, and we’ve worked with her before.” Those almost kind of, I guess friendly, more informal, more based on finding the right people with connections seem to work the best.

Graham: Another good one, and I’m sure that other float centers have different experiences. I know a lot that actually kind of enter into more formal relationships with wellness centers, and I’m curious how they do it because it feels like the more that we get to having someone sign on a contract, okay, yes, we’re going to put these in our lobby, and here’s the cut, or here’s the kind of mutual exchange we’re gonna do. And we’re like, okay, and we’ll each deliver brochures once every three months when the other one needs it or something like that, the set terms really … nothing puts a buzzkill on a budding relationship like having someone sign a contract that you’re going to be friends from now on. Which is kind of what it feels like.

The more that we’ve just sort of been enamored of someone, like we have an acupuncturist across the street from us, and our exchange with him is that he’s just able to come in and float whenever he wants. That’s pretty much it. We just trust that that’ll work out. We’re like, you’re awesome. And he does, and he also keeps brochures over at his place, he refers a ton of clients over our way, but that relationship feels much more legitimate because it’s kind of based just on this informal, you’re really cool, I trust that you’ll do the right thing, you come in and float whenever you want, I’m sure it’ll be good for you, and those types of relationships have just worked so much better for us.

Ashkahn: Yeah, definitely. The kind of, like, you’re homies, basically, right?

Graham: Yeah, you’re float homies.

Ashkahn: You’re float homies. Yeah. Then it’s cool because with that guy even across the street from us, we’ve done, after we’ve gotten-

Graham: We’ll just call him Chris.

Ashkahn: After we’ve worked with him for a little bit, we’ve done even more formal things. He gave an acupuncture session to every one of our members, and we gave it to our members as a gift one month. We gave him kind of the right amount of floats in exchange for that, and stuff like that. But that only came after we developed kind of this nice friendly exchange relationship with him.

Graham: Yeah, he came in and did a little presentation to our staff on facts and myths about acupuncture, which I thought was really interesting. He just kind of volunteered to come over. I’m sure that he thought that it would help get more referrals, but it was also just a neat little thing that we got to do for the staff, too.

Ashkahn: Yeah.

Graham: So, things like that. You get way more perks, and honestly, especially when you’re looking for these connections in the wellness community, I’ve always felt like there’s this element of helping people that’s just core to the business. So, I think that a lot of people who are wellness practitioners or yoga teachers or acupuncturists or whatever it is, their main drive is not making money or getting a kickback or having these formal relationships that will help their businesses, necessarily. What they want to do is help people, and I kind of feel like the more that you incentivize that, the less likely they are to refer people. This is based on absolutely no science and no data, I should say. This is just a hunch.

But it kind of makes sense, and it’s the experience we’ve had, which is the more formal you make those things, the more especially that you’re like, okay, well, you’ll get $10 of every float that you refer over, and they’ll use this discount code, and they’ll save money and you’ll get money, kind of thing. We haven’t done it in a long time, but we got almost no one from that kind of program. The more informal it is, the more I think when they’re … when someone comes in who they think will actually benefit from floating, they’re talking to that person, and they kind of look to themselves, and they’re like, “Well, I’m not getting any benefit from referring you over to this float center, but I think it’s gonna be good for you,” and that sense of being able to help without getting something in return, I almost think makes it more likely that they’ll do it.

Ashkahn: Yeah, that is kind of the double edged sword of referrals, I think, is that when someone refers you somewhere, then they say, “Oh, also, use this and you get this sort of discount,” or whatever, in the back of your mind, you’re always like, “Okay, well, how much do you actually think this, and how much are you just working for your kickback here?” That’s what I always think when I hear people referring things. It always brings a kind of certain sense of disingenuousness to the interaction where I don’t quite trust that they’re telling me just because they’re really into it, that I should go experience something.

Graham: Yeah, and I think people don’t even trust themselves, that they’re totally into it, right? They’re kind of like, oh, maybe I’m only referring this person because I get a kickback. Again, that’s probably not true in all industries, but I do feel like something that’s so tuned into their clients and to helping them as the wellness community at large, that that does actually become a factor.

So, do it. I recommend making connections in the wellness community, and I guess our final advice is make friends, not business alliances, or something.

Ashkahn: Yeah. At least friends first. That seems to be where it has to start.

Graham: Yup. Don’t be afraid to get them in for free floats. Honestly, much more important than having your brochures up somewhere or your flyer up somewhere or mentions on their Facebook page is if you’re actually getting the people who own a yoga studio into float, and the owners and all of their teachers are coming in to float, that’s gonna be way more valuable for your word of mouth and for getting out marketing than any kind of, again, formal arrangement or advertising in their actual shop or something like that.

Ashkahn: All right. Excellent. Well, if you guys have more questions you want to ask us, you can always hop over to floattanksolutions.com/podcast and you will hear from us again very soon.

Graham: Tomorrow, most likely.

Ashkahn: Yeah, specifically.

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