“Bird-dogging” is an old salesman term that refers to paying a commission to your own customers when they refer business to you. I assume the term draws from the concept of a hunting dog pointing to a bird for you. I recently ran into a barter version of this that I thought was interesting. This vendor was being promoted within one of my barter exchanges saying that they would pay $100 in barter currency to any exchange members that refer clients to them that end up doing business. Here’s the best part; they are looking for BOTH barter clients as well as cash clients. If the promotion worked, they would be pay $100 in barter for new cash clients! How great would that be!!!
If you wanted to expand your bird dog program to your cash clients, what you would do is find a really good give-away that you could purchase on barter (like a restaurant gift certificate?) and then offer that to all your cash clients as an incentive for referring business.
I haven’t tried this technique myself yet but I can’t think of how you could lose in trying. I’ll let you know how it goes when I give it a try.
Barterfanatic.com 
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