the 10% you need to know about -

Customer Retention

Most Important to Us All - Clients
 

Would you like to improve you customer retention, not just incrementally but dramatically? You probably answered, "Sure - who wouldn't?". We have all had marginal or low yield accounts that were more expensive to keep than the revenue they contributed. Another set of hands and future circumstance often transform these into someone else*s gold mine. So, let's not talk about retaining these accounts. Instead...
Value Dimensions of Your Clients
Let's talk about your bread and butter clients, those that are now providing you a steady base of revenue and activity and are the mainstay of your bottom-line. We are also talking about clients that are fundamental to your current goals and future direction.

The more strategic of these provide you with the diversity you need in your client portfolio or which may be difficult and effort intensive to replace if lost. They may even be the banner accounts that provide your firm with the credibility and experience needed to focus on an industry vertical or develop and reinforce a certain specialization.

Cost of Replacing the Lost Client

We are mindful of an evidence-supported belief of sales executives that it takes as much as ten times the effort to recruit a new client as to retain one. As senior members, whether principals or partners of our firms, many of us share the responsibility for our organization*s total marketing effort so we know this to be more or less so.

Our sales cycles are typically long. The time between first contact and first engagement can be a year or more. The costs of needing to replace an existing account are more than simply the effort expended through that year-long sales cycle. The costs to consider in your analysis must include the more difficult to measure effects of having your strategies delayed, the impact of your reduced reputation in the marketplace, the erosion of your collective confidence in front of clients, not to mention the reduction of your income and cash flows.

What Is the Root Cause?

The easy causes we can spot right away and often can correct them soon enough, despite the increasingly frantic nature of our competitor*s campaigns targeting our less secure clients. Perhaps an isolated loss of a small client provides us with an effective but regrettable wake-up call. However, it is the less obvious gaps between our clients and our strategies that seem to appear out of nowhere and as if overnight, which become the more troublesome causes.
Gaps between us and our clients do not really come out of nowhere, but we often think they do. These gaps allow our competitors the undefended, easy point of access which is all they really need.


Whereas in prior decades two things were certain * death and taxes, we now have a third certainty * unavoidable change surrounding us. While we cannot control the change taking place around us, we can control how we respond to it and what types of gaps we create, allow to exist, or close between our firms and our most valuable accounts.

Are you responding appropriately to change around you? Take the Litmus Test on the back of our brochure, answer thoughtfully, and perhaps you can find comfort in your self-assessment. Or else, it will be an important first step to improving your customer retention.

Jules Selymes

Managing Director

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