December 20, 2010
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Note: Those of you who have gone years without contracts or less then the best contract [putting it gently] and who then get the Standard Monitoring Contracts from me, have the task of getting current subscribers to sign new contracts. It's certainly time consuming [and by the way only going to be even more time consuming the more subscribers you sign up without proper contracts as time goes on]. Mitch Reitman, industry consultant and deal maker, shared a recent experience he had getting a company into "compliance" to maximize its selling potential [the December 10, 2010 email article]. This follow up inquiry requests additional info on the process. Mitch, thanks for sharing your info.
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Question:
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Ken,
Do you know which or what method Mitch used to get those contracts signed and returned? Certified mail or regular mail with return envelope? We would like to try his method since he seems to have great success.
Thanks in advance,
John Elmore
Security By Elmore Inc.
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Answer:
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I asked Mitch to respond to this inquiry and he was good enough to send this along:
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Ken
We do this as a service for other companies so we have a pretty good system.
It is pretty elaborate, but here are the basics:
Send a friendly letter to the customer base. "We reviewed your file and
noticed that there isn't a contract, we are enclosing a 1 year contract at
your current terms. Please sign and return". This step gets about 2/3 of
the customer base.
We send a second request to the stragglers, we mention that the new contract "fixes" the monitoring costs for the next year. We follow up with a phone
call three days later.
We send a third request offering a free "service check", and a free month of
service. We call three days later to set up the service call.
We send a fourth request, certified, we must have the contract in 30 days or
we will be forced to cancel monitoring. Please sign today to lock in your
monitoring rates and get a month free. We follow up with daily phone calls
for a week.
As soon as we begin managing a customer base, we get a new monitoring
agreement any time that we make a service call. We do this regardless of the
contract status of the customer. The idea is to get the customer to affirm the monitoring relationship and we don't do any work for customers without agreements.
Mitch Reitman
S.I.C. Consulting, Inc.
Fort Worth, TX 76107
817-698-9999