Develop a Strategy to Maintain Your Clients During Challenging Times
By Wayne Brown, Managing Partner - The Walker Group NYC
In this economy growing your business can create challenges. The cost of doing business, whether the decision is to outsource your solution or manage it internally, is a decision that has to be made. Many small business owners are not fully aware of the cost to acquire and maintain a new client, but knowing these numbers can be the difference between building or losing your business. Whether the true cost is known or not, it is an expense and the customer acquisition cost continues to escalate. Although gaining new clients is hard work, when your client’s defect, knowing the reasons why they choose to leave is important. This intelligence can be used to retain your other clients. If you are not taking care of your clients, someone else is waiting to do so.
For a business to expand and grow there is a need to reduce defection and understand the steps to take to build client retention. Having successfully executed a marketing strategy for a number of companies, it is important to have an understanding of your client business strategies and goals, if possible. Some of this information can be obtained via Internet research or through their marketing brochures and other information obtained from your own client interviews and regular evaluation meetings. Building a basic program to monitor and evaluate your client portfolio can go a long way. The effort taken to obtain new clients must be balanced by delivering value and helping them to meet their business objectives. Here are a few basic questions to consider:
Do I hold regular assessment and evaluation meetings to determine there is an alignment with the service level agreements and they are consistently achieved?
Is the client available for feedback, whether positive or constructive?
When the feedback is less than positive, is there an action plan developed and agreed to by the client so there is a clear path to demonstrate improvement?
Have you obtained competitor intelligence and how is this information used when communicating to your clients?
How do you respond to requests to make changes to your service offering from your clients?
The responses to these questions can provide you with the information needed to provide additional value to your customers. Holding regular client meetings with an agenda to cover the outstanding issues is important to build a stronger relationship. Customers continue to test the market and may regularly “flirt” with the competition.
I recall another situation when a large FinTech company provided outsourced technology payment processing for a large global bank. As with many large implementations, there are many issues that get resolved over time. The relationship manager responsible for this account had a long list of issues that required resolution. However, developing a process to address the open issues and implementing a Quarterly Business Review provided the bank with both the confidence and assurance that their business mattered. The forum also created a stronger relationship between the bank and the technology provider.
Developing a plan to ensure you are doing everything you can to retain your clients is worth all the effort. Working to obtain new business when other clients are defecting is the not the recipe for a successful business. However, ignoring your clients, being viewed as a vendor rather than a strategic partner will not result in a sustainable relationship, rather working to be an advocate for your client is possible and achievable.
The Walker Group is a marketing and business development company serving multiple industries including FinTech, banking and technology. Our varied market segments enables us to identify synergies and opportunities to stimulate growth as we partner with our clients to build their business. Through our one-on-one CEO Advisory Services we have helped companies to navigate through their key business problems, increase sales, build new revenue streams, market their product and gain new customers.
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