Why Are Existing Customers Your Best Place to Get New Business in 2012?
Break out the Rolodex, as we kick off each year we often forget about our greatest and most affordable marketing opportunities – existing customers. As we start 2012, focus on your customers first for two reasons:
- Statistically, professional services firms may lose up to 20% of their clients each year. This attrition alone means that you need to retain more clients and replace what you lose before you ever consider a growth plan.
- Existing customers are the most affordable to reach. A common problem is that clients always view your offerings based on the services that you provided them when they hired you. A regular marketing program to existing customers can expose clients to the leadership that you offer other clients and allow opportunities to cross-sell additional services that they may not currently lean to you for. A basic CRM program, email marketing and social media are three great ways to do this.
With some signs of economic recovery, it is important that your customers understand the full breadth of your services and that they see the wins that you provide your other clients on a regular basis. This way, when they decide to come out of their shell and increase their marketing investments you are the first ones that they call.
What are the best strategies that you have found for retaining existing customers?
Deadlines, Deadlines, Deadlines. Don’t Let Them Kill Your Best Work.
In marketing, our worlds often revolve around the deadlines. In the good ole’ days we called it “Chasing the FedEx truck” and at least we got to go home at 8pm. But once bandwidth increased and we were sending work over email, we had 24 hours in the day to worry about deadlines, like it or not.
Although deadlines often drive our inspiration, on occasion arbitrary deadlines cause us to turn in less than stellar work.
Do You Create Good Work or Smart Work?
Good work is subjective, smart work is successful. Great ideas and beautiful design work are often judged on the backend of the project by clients and creative teams. Where smart work is judged by ROI after the results are in.
Smart work takes time. Time to think through the problem before we ever get to a solution. Sometimes it even takes more creativity to find the problem than it does to come up with solutions. So make sure that you give yourself enough time on the front end of a project to identify the real problem and then concept a smart solution.
Good work looks nice but often solves the wrong problem. Smart work defines the problem, and then delivers a great solution that drives results.
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