Deliver and Satisfy

So you’ve attracted a prospect and gotten a warm lead. You’ve developed a relationship through continuing education and non threatening contact and you’ve converted your prospect into a customer. Now what? Once you have closed the deal and secured a new customer, the work has just begun. It is important to keep in constant contact with that customer throughout the implementation process and beyond. Many business owners are so focused on getting new clients and filling their funnel with qualified prospects that they forget the goldmine they have sitting in their current base of customers.

If you spend all or most of your marketing dollars on getting new customers and ignore your existing base of customers you could be putting your business at risk. It is five to seven more times expensive to get a new customer than to retain an existing one so it’s important to “deliver what you promised” and keep building the relationship.

There are several reasons a customer might drop your service/product and here are some of them. They could move or die; this makes up a very small percentage. They could find a friend in the business they would have a stronger relationship with than you and feel a sense of obligation to that person. They could go to a competitor who may have paid more attention to them, educated them more or have listened to their needs and provided a more robust service than you have to offer. But, a staggering 65 – 70% of customers cancel because of lack of interest from the company they are dealing with.

When you sell something the first rule of thumb is deliver what you promised and deliver on time. Deliver quality and ensure that your customer is trained so that he/she can use your product to their satisfaction seeing the results that they’re looking for. There is nothing worse than delivering a quality product and losing a customer a couple of months later because they didn’t see the results they were hoping for. If you’re on top of this, then you can zero in on the cause before it becomes a big problem. It’s always easier to fix something if you catch it before it becomes a huge deal. Once they’ve been trained and are using your product regularly and efficiently, it’s important to stay in constant contact with them. Here are some of the things you might contact your customer about:

• New product feature or enhancement

• New product offering

• Special occasions (send a thank you or a greeting card)

• Your “office shutdown” hours during holidays/vacations

• New pricing, contest

• Questionnaires and regularly scheduled touches (to ensure you and your product/service are meeting their needs)

As always, once you start building your list of prospects and customers, your hands are full and there aren’t enough hours in the day to get to everyone. We get that and that’s why it’s so important to automate your processes of contact and follow up as much as possible. Spending all that time getting a customer and then forgetting to keep in touch with them is business suicide. All that work down the tubes. Then there are those clients who you may not have contacted for years that might not even know about some of the new things you have to offer and might be going to your competitor for it. These are all detrimental business blunders.

To learn more about the lead management tools that can help you keep in touch with your clients on a regular basis, CLICK HERE or Book a Consultation with us. Next month in Part 5 we’re going to talk about Up-selling Customers.