There are only three ways to grow your business:
1) Get more clients
2) Get those clients to buy more often
3) Get those clients to spend more every time they buy
Most business owners focus all their marketing attention on getting new clients. But did you know, the fastest way to grow your business and its net profit is to focus more attention on the clients you already have.
Think of your business as a leaking bucket. You keep adding extra water (clients) but some of the water seeps out of the holes in the bottom of the bucket.
It’s extremely difficult to ensure your bucket is 100% leak-proof. But you can plug the largest holes. That means an efficient marketing system that markets as much to existing clients, as it does new clients.
Sometimes, as business owners, we tend to focus all of our attention on our worst clients (because they generate the most noise) and leave the best clients to it. Figuring they’ve been clients for ages, so “they’ll be OK”.
Here’s the thing. People are more likely to switch suppliers because of the ancillary factors, than they are the core service itself. The actual IT support might be better than it has ever been. But if a long-term client feels as though “things aren’t as good as they used to be”, you have a problem.
Something as simple as a change in the person answering the phone can have a dramatic effect on retention. In a good or bad way.
The answer is to communicate more with your existing clients and never allow them to forget how critical you are to their business.
This doesn’t mean introducing a newsletter; they rarely give a good ROI (return on investment).
Instead you need single message communications that cut through all the other marketing clutter. This means more letters, emails, text messages, Facebook content – ways of educating your clients about issues that are important to them, and getting them to interact with you and buy something from you.
OK, you don’t want to encourage unnecessary support calls. That’s not right.
But you do want to encourage them to rely on your business for the important big picture stuff. You want to be at the heart of their strategic reviews and planning for the future.
Imagine the power of this. You can advise on the best IT setup to support them today, tomorrow and in the years to come.
By becoming a strategic advisor, and not just “the people who fix the computers”, you move from being a supplier to being a Trusted Partner.
