03.24.23 — Old customers
03.24.23 — Old customers
How to leverage your greatest asset
I want to talk to you for a few minutes about something purely business.
After all, I am a business person who deviates quite a lot into family & personal growth. But business is the intense passion that has built much of the momentum of my life.
These days I spend most of my time consulting a small portfolio of brands & clients (the most recent ‘project’ getting a good portion of my focus being wealthyconsultant.com).
The same big bottleneck shows up in every clients’ business and it’s a simple bottleneck to fix, in theory:
People are obsessed with NEW.
So let’s diagnose.
At one of my old brands, we got so good at customer acquisition that the sales floor (we had 30 or 40 sales people, working in a giant office — it was loud and chaos) started referring to our customers as “leads.”
It wasn’t because they were dumb, it was just that there were more customers coming into this business, than most brands had leads — and so they would say things like “Lead flow is down this week.”
I’d look and see that the marketing team had brought in 6,000 leads that week. I’d say, “What do you mean ‘lead flow’ is down?” To which they’d reply, “Oh we only had 500 this week… we’re used to more.”
The 500 figure was customers — like, “Paid us money for a product,” CUSTOMERS. I said no no no no… go call the thousands of people that expressed interest and don’t come back to this meeting until you can do the actual work of talking to our market (not just our customers).
The customer acquisition machine was so good, and so efficient, that the team never had enough time to talk to all the leads. They barely had time to talk to the customers. And they never had time to talk to OLD customers.
When you look at this in hindsight, you get a perfect “20/20” insight.
Most brands set elaborate key performance indicators on new business. They fail to track, enhance, and reliably invest into the retention (and engagement) of their greatest asset: old customers.
It doesn’t matter whether you sell cars, or timeshares, or online education, or services. The most exciting feeling in the world for you SHOULD be the retention & ascension of current/old customers.
That’s when you begin entering “MOAT” territory (otherwise known as a defensive perimeter around your business).
Here are three of my favorite ways to leverage old customers.
Talk to them
You should have emails, calls, and texts that are only designed for old/current customers.
When ALL of your resources go into courting new business, it’s easy to lose relationship with people who already gave you money. They are, by definition, more important. Why? Because they’ve already shown they are willing and able to invest into your business.
Create for them
Not all products are for the acquisition of NEW customers.
When our customers tell us what they’re wanting or needing, we listen to it. It’s not uncommon for us to create new things explicitly for the folks who’ve already converted.
Talk about them
This is one of my favorites.
Every week, I talk with a handful of clients, partners and customers. I want to know how we can help them even more. Then, every chance I get, I talk about them (not using their names or details of course) to demonstrate expertise.
We strive to give our clients a platform to speak & teach on as well.
After all, they’re contributing to the community you are building (if you don’t think you’re building community — you’re going to lose… it isn’t optional anymore).
A recent example of this.
The end
A good practice: sit with a notepad and ask, “How can I show attention & appreciation to the people who are already trusting enough to be in my circle?”
Every week I try to reach out to people like this.
And it pays off!
-T