Customer Retention Tool
The #1 reason that 24% of customers will leave you this year is because the salesperson loses contact. (Sales & Marketing Magazine.) Not for a better product, better service, or a cheaper price. But because the salesperson lost contact. An easy, low-cost, fixable problem. Talk about losing easy sales that cost you thousands of dollars.
Still not convinced that you’re losing easy money? The Harvard Business Review published a Bain & Co. study finding that (a) it is 6-7 time more expensive to gain a new customer than it is to retain an existing one; (b) U.S. companies lose 50% of their customers every 5 years; and (c) a 5% increase in customer retention can increase profits by 25-95%.
New customer acquisition costs are expensive: advertising, commissions, discounts, incentives, and personnel’s time. The best companies try to balance the two: customer retention and new business acquisition.
The extent of customer retention strategies used by most all companies is the “mobile phone carrier” reactive-not-proactive strategy: wait until you’re surprised by the customer who announces she’s leaving for your competitor and then promise her discounted prices if she stays.
Customer retention is what Jeffrey J. Fox, How to Become a Marketing Superstar, calls a “Keeping activity”. He says sales and marketing is about two things: getting customers and keeping customers. Nothing else matters he says.
If customer retention is your problem, here’s the solution. Three groups in your company have primary responsibility for keeping your customers. Sales, management, and service. This way if any one person at your company disappears, your business won’t fall into the laps of your competitors. You have a trinity of relationships working to save the account.
Since they’re the ones who signed their accounts, salespeople are at the forefront of keeping them. They need an easy-to-use tool like the You’ve Got Contacts D-I-Y Sales & Marketing Email Postcards ™ to keep in touch with every customer every month so their customers don’t become one of your loss statistics.
Management is the second line of defense. They need to control the situation where their salespeople might get recruited by the competition and leave with the company’s assets. Management needs to establish its own relationship with each salesperson’s account by sending You’ve Got Contacts D-I-Y Sales & Marketing Email Postcards ™. If they fail to establish the rapport, they might as well give your customer list to your competitors.
Finally, the service department steps up to the plate. They send You’ve Got Contacts D-I-Y Sales & Marketing Email Postcards ™ not only to remind your customers to continue to come to you for their service needs, but to cross-sell new services and products. Plus, they can turn the double-play and introduce your salespeople to service customers who come in through the back door that sales never sees.
You’ve got to make every contact counts because every contact sells. If You’ve Got Contacts.
(For more detailed information for how to increase your customer retention, download my free ebook, Selling without Cold Calling? – the Holy Grail of Selling, and read the chapter “Let’s Talk About Retention – Customer Not Water”.)
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