Client Acquisition vs. Retention

1/10/2020

While you must grow to survive, optimize your existing relationships to thrive.

Increase profitability through customer engagement and retention

What does it cost you to acquire a new client? Most companies don’t track this metric. Yet, we’re not talking about most companies, we are talking about your efforts. When was the last time you hit the streets and tried to gain traction with new prospects or in a new market? It’s difficult.

Sales is a process of jumping through multiple hoops to attain a small window for making an impression that could possibly, just maybe, lead to a sales opportunity.

What are some of the obstacles to new client acquisition?

Six keys to new client acquisition for small businesses:

Research. The worst thing you can do is waste someone’s time. In order to reduce those chances you have to risk wasting your own time researching your contenders.
Access. Good research helps you to hone in your targets and determine who the decision makers are. Most decision makers have built in fortifications to keep spamming sales people away.
Approach. Sales people know that the same approach does not work with every client, you must use your research and intuition to be creative in order to break down barriers.
Saturation. You are competing with everyone else in your space as well as all the other businesses who see your prospect as a target.
Time. Every candidate that gives you a moment of their precious time is taking away from something they could be doing to complete their work or personal time.
Value. If you find a way to surmount saturation, time constraints and a bevy of other obstacles, you still have to overcome the hurdle of creating a value proposition.

Unlocking the profitability of client retention as an entrepreneur.

Customer acquisition requires heavy investments of time and resources in repeated doses. If you aren’t tracking your efforts at an individual level then you are cutting yourself short of valuable data that will help you to improve your process. If you aren’t discussing wins and losses as a team then you are missing opportunities to help each other shorten the learning curve. You need to be intentional about tracking your efforts to acquire new clients so that you can adapt and achieve your goals.

While you must acquire new clients to grow your business, don’t forget to double down on your customer engagement and retention endeavors. According to Studio 15 CEO Jia Wertz, who sites, in her Forbes article, a study by Bain & Company, “Increasing customer retention rates by 5% increases profits by 25% to 95%.” Developing simple, yet intentional, client engagement and retention measures can pay significant returns for your team. Simple and yet overlooked. Jia has some great recommendations, which include:

Four keys to a better return on your client engagement efforts:

Identify your VIP customers - I would call them your “ideal clients”. Who are the clients who get you and will help others to find value with your products and/or services. Do you know your “ideal client”? Do you optimize those relationships and do you also use that information to refer clients who aren’t ideal to organizations that would be a better fit?
Determine what keeps your customers coming back - this is a great point, what do your clients like about your products and/or services as opposed to what you think they appreciate. Do you ask?
Go above and beyond for the client - this sounds like it should be common sense but how often do you get too comfortable with a key client and someone else is able to leverage that lack of attention to steal them? If you don’t stay engaged, someone will come along and entice them.
Nothing replaces the human touch - Jia says, “I personally connect with many of our members to get to know them better and get their insights on our service.” Customer engagement and retention is the responsibility of everyone in the organization. It’s important to lead by example.

Tips for better returns on your marketing investments.

Client acquisition is at least five times more expensive than optimizing existing customer relationships. When you operate from a collaborative position, you can find ways to build stronger relationships with your team, clients and partners. Jia shares some insight from another business leader, President of Suite 203 Communications, Lauren Cracower who shares how to win-win-win in caring for a client. “To nurture your existing clients, it’s important to be a connector for them. We always strive to strategically align our clients to suppliers, contacts or other great businesses that can help them achieve their goals.”

Connect. Collaborate. Conquer.

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The key to getting 10’s of more coffee appointments with potential clients

6/25/2019

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Meeting new clients through coffee appointments

Coffee is king when meeting new clients

If you have a prospective client that you would like to get to know, coffee is a great neutral ground (pun).

Most people like coffee and if your client doesn’t like coffee that should be reason enough to move along.

So, how do you do it? How do you get millions of dollars in new business by simply buying someone an overpriced cup-of-Joe?

With our proven multi-step process you will improve your close ratio by fractions of a percent - and there’s more.

Step 1: To getting more coffee client appointments

Keep it simple. Funny enough, early in my career I thought it was important to share my resume in a conversational email.

Using my background in criminal justice, I deduced that most people were indifferent to my impressive list of marginal accomplishments.

I further gathered that there was a direct relationship between the length of the email and the rejection rate of my requests.

Keep your request simple. If people are interested they will look you up on LinkedIn or ask around. You don’t need to tell them your life story or make an impassioned pleas for why they should choose contestant number 3.

Step 2: For achieving higher success rates in client prospecting with coffee

Be specific. Rather than an open ended invite to coffee at a place of their choosing at some future date, pick a place and a time.

It may seem intrusive to invite Jane Doe to the Bestest Java on Wednesday at 930 AM but I believe it is actually quite polite.

By providing a place and time you aren’t wasting their time searching the whole of their calendar and thinking through when would be best for them.

You also increase the probability that they actually check their calendar. “Is it even possible for me, Jane Doe, to meet at the Bestest Java on Wednesday at 930 AM?” It simplifies the process.

They can say yes.

They can say no.

Or they can say, "Actually Thursday at 830 AM would be better."

Additional Tips: For guaranteed improvements to your client coffee outreach

I promised there would be more. Here it is.

Additional tips:

1. Most people like to try new things.

If there is a new place use that as a reason to invite them.

2. Experiment with taste and location.

If your prospect has a specific coffee taste, using a specific place may allow them to suggest a different location. I have some people who like Fast food chain coffee and others who stick with the known names. There have been plenty of times when when clients have said, “I’ve never been there.”

3. If they can’t find the time, offer to bring coffee to them and/or their team.

When you get your coffee meet up on the books, do as much research as you can to enable you to make an initial impression. Don’t over do it but come prepared. It is polite, professional and effective to know some basics about your prospect.

4. Make it about them.

If this is an initial invite you should plan to keep things primarily personal, get to know the person and work to earn their trust. Most people want to have a sense of whether they know, like and trust you before they will do business.

5. Ask questions and get them talking.

This is both polite and Sales 101. It is ok to go the whole meeting and not talk about yourself. Typically if you are genuinely interested there will come an opportunity where your guest will ask you, “So, what is it that you do?”

6. Be prepared to respond.

Practice makes perfect. Whether you are new to sales or meeting a client for the first time. Do some base level research as well as some role play in how you think the conversation might go. Be prepared to keep it light but never be caught off guard if the client is ready to dig into the business relationship. If you work through scenarios prior to the meeting you will be better prepared to seem confident rather than desperate when the time comes to discuss your products and/or services.

Don't forget to thank us when you increase your close rate on client coffee meetings

If you weren't ready before reading this information, you are now.
And if you fail it's not our fault.
Read the steps again.
Make reminder notes or memorization cards if you need to.
Keep repeating until it confirms that we were right.

When inviting another professional to coffee - keep it simple, don’t waste time, be specific and be genuine. I’ll guarantee that this is more effective than being complicated, wasting time, being generic and doing the typical sales routine.

If you haven’t increased your close ratio by fractions of a percent, we will give you your money back.

Let us know if you’ve had 10’s of more coffee appointments by using these ultra secret steps to maximum success.

Interested in business and leadership concepts presented in a comic strip style format? You may find some encouragement in our latest series The Modern Leader: Loyalty, a four page presentation of perspectives on how to compete in the modern workplace. When leaders embrace the challenges of an ever evolving modern working environment they can win internally (workplace) as well as externally (marketplace).