[TriLUG] OT: referal and introduction fees

[Warren Myers]

I personally have never used such a 'referral fee'. I do get word-of-mouth 
advertising, but I don't go around telling people to do it, they do it of 
their own volition and goodwill.

I also have not had large contracts arise from word-of-mouth advertising, 
and paying someone $5 for a $50 job is high in my mind.

However, I do participate in a couple of the online affiliate networks (
bn.com <http://bn.com>, crucial.com <http://crucial.com>), where they 
provide me with a percentage based on orders originating from my website, 
but they are 'legit' businesses, with loads of customers, and it's a direct 
form of advertising I'm providing for them that they're paying for on a 
(potentially) much smaller scale than they would if they paid a set rate per 
month to put their link on my site.

So, the referral fee you talk about, while potentially a good idea, really 
shouldn't extend past one person (A gets x% for B, but not for C whom B 
refers you to). It's advertising, plain and simple, and you don't normally 
pay the third/fourth/fifth/n-tier people to advertise. Tide pays CBS to 
refer customers to them. But they don't pay me to refer another layer after 
that.

WMM

On 8/4/05, Joseph Mack NA3T <jmack at wm7d.net> wrote:
> 
> On Thu, 4 Aug 2005, Jeffrey A. Groves wrote:
> 
> > I consider the whole "introduction fee" deal to be a revolting practice 
> that
> > is tantamount to usury.
> 
> well yes.
> 
> All I know is that when I approached the (non-technical) customer
> with my unsolicited proposal for their setup, I didn't even get the
> courtesy of a return phone call accepting or declining my offer.
> When my (non-technical) introducer offered to have a go (without me
> there), he glad-handed them, slapped them on the back and did a whole lot
> of zero content bluster. The non-technical customer representative
> said "why sure".
> 
> It appears that technical people have a hard time selling a technical
> product to a non-technical person. In my work I've found this to
> be the norm. The people with money don't want to talk to their
> own technical people. They'd rather talk to sales people e.g.
> 
> 
> http://www.austintek.com/book_reviews/the_ibm_way.html
> 
> Joe
> 
> --
> Joseph Mack NA3T EME(B,D), FM05lw North Carolina
> jmack (at) wm7d (dot) net - azimuthal equidistant map
> generator at http://www.wm7d.net/azproj.shtml
> Homepage http://www.austintek.com/ It's GNU/Linux!
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-- 
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"God may not play dice with the universe, but something strange is going on 
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