Today I had the pleasure of meeting Frank Burke, if you’re from Chattanooga you may recognize him as the owner of the Chattanooga Lookouts baseball team.

You may be wondering what this has to do with marketing so sit back and I’ll tell you right now.

Frank is a good speaker and seems to have a true passion for what he is doing, but he says he is always looking for ways to get people out to the baseball game.

Give People A Reason To Do Business With You

He has had many attractions such as camels in the outfield, and a guy that is about 3-1/2 feet tall to get his three and a half inning stretch. (An idea that is a little out there but people come to see it).The point here is, he’s giving people a reason to come out and ultimately hand him their money for their ticket.

Do you offer people a reason to do business with you? If not you may give this some thought and come up with your own ideas or gimmicks.

Treat People Like You Want To Be Treated

Of course, no business will go on long without sales which should be your number one priority, but running in second and almost as important as sales is how you treat your customers once they decide to do business with you.

His (Franks) thing that he reportedly tells his employees before every home game is that there may be someone out there attending their first game and he wants it to be the best experience they can have. This boils down to customer service.

Does your company have great customer service? If you’ve ever done business with me, you know I will go to great lengths to make sure my customers are happy. If that means answering questions, helping load a lead capture form on a website, copywriting tips, whatever it is, it doesn’t matter. The customer must be happy!

If you’re not taking care of your customers they will go somewhere else. I don’t want to go on a tangent here, But I bet you’ve had a similar situation. While talking with my brother last night we brought up the television services. I have DirectTV and was showing him why I am so displeased with that service, (It takes way to long to respond to my commands given through the remote control) and telling him that DirectTV doesn’t seem the smallest bit concerned that I am so unhappy.

He said yeah, once they’ve got you they don’t care at all anymore, you have to become a customer of someone else before they will care about you again.

That is absolutely ludicrous in my mind, yet still seems to be true. You can be sure on the day my contract with them is up I’ll be a customer of someone else’s. Everyone has encountered bad customer service, what did you do? Tell everyone you could not to do business with the nightmarish business? Just quit doing business with them? Whatever it was I’m sure it wasn’t good for the company you were unhappy with.

Sorry that is a hot button. I’ll digress.

Ask People To Do Business With You

The other thing that Frank does to get people to the baseball game is, drum roll please… He ask’s them to come. We all should be actively asking people to become our customers, it’s simple, easy and works.

Anyway the point here is about three things:

1. Give the people a reason to do business with you
2. Ask them to do business with you
3. Treat them like you’d like to be treated when they do business with you.

I’d like to thank Frank Burke for his time and his thoughts that really wrap up the essence of a successful business.

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