Carl Maerz

Carl Maerz is a co-founder of Rocket Referrals, a startup company focused on helping businesses gain referrals from customers. This is his first blog on IowaBiz.

Having spent a considerable amount of time working in 10 different states and across three continents, I realized that Iowa offers something truly remarkable -- a sense of community like nowhere else. Here, relationships are king.

The heartland ideology is woven into the threads of business as companies understand that in Iowa, perhaps more than anywhere else, the customer matters.

As a consequence, many local businesses excel in customer satisfaction. We get it here. But what most businesses have yet to understand is that for this very reason there is a substantial opportunity for new business via referrals. Therefore, my goal is as an IowaBiz blogger is to explore the topic of referral business for local Iowa companies. I am here to provide some useful information in the topic and to investigate the reasons why people refer, and strategies businesses can implement to actively increase their referral equity.

I am a native of Iowa myself. Growing up in a small town, I began experiencing business through the eyes of a child observing my father’s local retail business. Even at such a young age I was able to understand the importance of word of mouth for a company’s growth. Following my education at Creighton University, I was the head of North American sales for a software company based out of Frankfurt, Germany. My early career took me all over Europe and North America.

At this point, I had a firm grasp of business from a sales and marketing perspective, but I was still missing part of the human aspect that I gained in the military. After several years in software, I served as intelligence officer in Afghanistan for the US Army. It was here that I really began to understand more of the psychology behind people and grasped social network theory. After my term ended in the Army I returned to Iowa to lead Rocket Referrals with my brother and cofounder Torey. We have developed software that automates many of the strategies I will talk through in later posts.

Most of the topics I discuss will be tactics that businesses can apply right away that will lead to an increase in referrals. I will reference personal experiences and research while tying each post into an overall strategy and investigating current trends in referral business.

You can reach Carl at:

515-512-5184

carl@rocketreferrals.com

or on Twitter @rocketreferrals