How Meny Hoffman Turned $1 Into Brand Loyalty

Tim: The invoice. That time where you say to your clients, okay, time to pay up. It doesn’t exactly put a smile in your client’s faces even if you do the best work ever. So how can you take that mildly unpleasant experience and turn into yet another opportunity to increase brand loyalty and create a fun way to interact?

Meny Hoffman from PTex Group has a fantastic way to do just that which is become a part of his business which is clients demand. The best part, it didn’t cost one single dollar.

I’m Tim Paige, the senior conversion educator here at LeadPages and this is ConversionCast.

Hey Meny, welcome to ConversionCast. Thanks for coming on the show.

Meny: My pleasure. Thanks for having me

Tim: Absolutely. So today’s tactic, we’ve got something that is a little bit in different. You know, our audience is used to hearing and x percent increase in revenue or whatever it is. This one it’s a little bit harder to nail down a specific increase but this one deals more with how do you collect on invoices and how do you turn that experience of getting an invoice, getting a bill into something that can be, you know, positive and something that people look forward to?

I’m excited to talk about that. There’s no specific hard data we’re going to get into and I just wanted to preface the discussion with that. So all that said, can you tell people a little bit about who you are and what you guys do?

Meny: Sure. My name is Meny Hoffman. I’m the CEO of the company called Ptex Group. We’re located in Brooklyn, New York. We’re a marketing and business service agency, helping, growing business to flourish by providing them with branding, marketing and different tactics to help the businesses grow. We have been doing this for 60 years now helping those businesses with the different services we offer.

Tim: That’s awesome and so it’s not just an online thing. This is general all around the board?

Meny: Correct. Basically we pride ourselves by being able to take a strategy and executing with a 360 degree lens. So we’re able to look at what [Indiscernible [00:02:09] this client needs and then provide them from the actual branding of marketing, packaging or web development to actually online, offline and marketing materials.

Tim: Awesome. And so this was a tactic that you actually implemented for your own business. You had these clients. You wanted to make the experience of invoicing better. Can you tell us the story? Tell us about how that worked and then you can tell us exactly what you did.

Meny: Sure. So basically we strive for making clients happy and that means turning every transaction into an experience. I would tell all your listeners that you could offer a service, you could offer a product but there’s always the next big thing coming up and the new company on the block, the new kid on the block as we call it offering the same service and maybe a little better, maybe just the same.

So when you want to build a company, you always have to focus on the relationship. By building your relationship, you can only do it if you turn every transaction into an experience. We currently look at every single step of the experience to see is this an experience or is it just a transaction. So the only one unhappy place or unpleasant moment we now that everybody has that’s exactly when you get an invoice and you say oh shoot, I need to pay that bill. Even if you had this experience you are able to have phenomenal results. You’re able to see the quality and the value of the work that we have put in but nobody is very pleasant by paying a bill.

So we said, let’s be creative. How could we make that process a little bit easier and infuse a little bit of creativity to that process.

Tim: Nice.

Meny: Yes. So we came up with this initially we had some brainstorming and one of our creative people came up and said how about we do a rewards program? For every dollar spent, you get some sort of reward. The other guy on the table said how about we do some sort of our own catalogue of prices that you can get? Ultimately it didn’t fit our bill because we are speaking to sophisticated, growing companies. Those people are not interested in the gift or a freebie or so on and so forth.

So we wanted to have that same excitement but yet not feel that they have to not choose from a catalogue some sort of gift. Then all of a sudden this idea came up and he says how about we just create, we’re in New York state and New York City in New York we have the lottery tickets and I think all the states have the instant lottery tickets. He says how about we just insert a simple lottery ticket in every invoice that we send out?

Everybody on the table said, this is a great idea. Let’s do it. So we went ahead. We created just an insert which is the size of the envelope that goes along which says with Ptex, you’re always a winner and if you win, please let us know and a toll free number for that and then next to it we actually stick on actually New York City, New York State instant lottery ticket.

[00:05:02]

We just mailed that as an insert with every single invoice that goes out.

Tim: I love that. I mean it’s really funny because if you think about it, chances are people aren’t going to be winning some big amount of money. It’s going to be some little thing. But it does create that little sense of excitement around it and that hope that hey maybe we’ll win something cool and we can do something at the office or whatever it is. And it starts to become, like I look forward to now getting that invoice even though traditionally it’s something I’m like I got to pay this stupid bill you know?

Meny: Yes. So I think what you just mentioned is brilliant. I mean it is a little thing and that’s exactly what you need. Not always do you need to have that big robust program that you’re putting in place and therefore this needs to be approved budgets and it needs to be approved by leadership and so on and so forth.

It’s the little thing that counts. That’s exactly the purpose of it and that’s exactly the results that we’re seeing.

Tim: Right and you know you’re talking about spending a dollar, two dollars whatever it is to create this experience in this relationship with your customers. How are they responding to this?

Meny: So they love it. Meaning to say it became like stapled item that even if we like this is going on for I think one and a half to two years now and we can’t even stop it.

Tim: [Laughs]

Meny: Because our envelope so our branding we have some striking colors. We have a deep blue and gray and orange and green. Those are different colors that we use within our own branding. So our full, the envelope are full colored envelopes. So it almost became like a phenomenon in people’s offices where they say oh the blue envelop arrived. Let me rip it open first because let me see their lottery ticket is a winner.

Tim: Right.

Meny: So it became that exciting part which yes it will… you said you started in the intro that we won’t have hard data as what it did for our receivables but we do have hard data. The hard data is that it created this brand loyalty. It created that culture, understanding those guys are innovative, those guys are creative and it bounded the relationship which that’s exactly the purpose of it which is binding the relationship, making sure that we show, we appreciate everything we do and we’ll go the extra mile. Even when the invoice arrives, that if we could instill some creativity we’ll do that as well.

Tim: So are you then noticing that your invoices are getting paid more quickly or more often?

Meny: So we could say that that for sure that if we miss an invoice that means in the past we all know if business people you know you miss a payment because the invoice never arrived. All of a sudden the payment is for the next invoice versus the existing current invoice. So we’ve seen a little bit of a pattern of people paying more attention to the arrival of invoices so automatically that goes into the system quicker and ultimately we get paid quicker. But that’s just the subconsciously. It’s in a conscious like we’re not offering pay by 30 days and receive 5% off and therefore we see the data exactly. But we see people are paying attention to invoices which usually is if they’ll send it, we’ll receive it. We’ll put it into the system and so on and so forth. So it’s much more paid attention than… did we receive the last invoice? If we didn’t let me call those people.

The funny part is that we have people that as we live in a digital world and people say and email me  the invoices. We could hear a lot of times the client is saying no, I want this mailed because I need that.

Tim: [Laughs]

Meny: Yeah or if it’s a prepaid job they’ll say you know what I’m prepaying it but still mail me that zero invoice.

Tim: Nice. Yeah.

Meny: So it’s another level of bonding with the customer and showing them that the relationship does matter.

Tim: Yeah. I love it. You know, these little things that we can do again sometimes it’s tough to know is this going to have a direct ROI. Are we going to see hard numbers increase. But I think these little things can make a big difference regardless of what industry or business that you’re in.

Meny: Yeah. Actually we had a very interesting story. We have two clients that are actually in the same building and the blue envelop arrived by mistake to the wrong tenant. Meaning obviously one of our clients that the other client, not the client that it was addressed to. One of the employees ripped open the envelope and it was a $50 winner.

Tim: Wow.

Meny: After finding out he’s a $50 winner, he saw that this invoice wasn’t addressed to their company, was through the neighbors which is also a client of ours.

Tim: That’s so good.

Meny: They called me. We have this issue. We have to go for arbitration. Who gets the $50?

Tim: [Laughs]

Meny: So again it’s the conversation is happening around your creativity. Conversation is happening around what you’re trying to be innovative and do something out of the box. I think which if I could leave anything to your listeners, it’s not about this idea what you’re hearing. It’s also look through the process of your company, see which are the touch points you have with the client which is very traditional or it’s a way that it’s done for the last 100 years or whatever and that’s how you went into doing it. See if you can revolutionize it. How could you add some experience to it and make it into an experience versus just a transaction.

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Tim: Nice. Yeah. No, I think that’s great. That’s a great point and I think this is something that can help people regardless of the business that they’re in. So thanks for sharing this on our show. We really appreciate it.

Meny: My pleasure.