Hi, and welcome again to another exciting, money-making, marketing tip.
As I mentioned at the end of my last tip, I will be writing over the next few weeks, about easy ways to grow your business without spending a lot of money.
Since I do a lot of consulting and speak at many seminars, I often get the question, “Ken, what’s the easiest way I can grow my business without spending a lot of time and money?”
There are quite a few answers to this question, but I will always ask them a question of my own…
“What is your attrition rate?”
As you can imagine, they look at me with a bewildered look on their faces. Attrition refers to the level or amount of loss that you get in a particular area.
The attrition rate of clients refers to how many clients come to you, buy from you once or twice, and then stop being your client.
What to me is even more mind blowing, is that most of the businesses and a surprisingly large number of the professionals I meet, don’t actually know what their attrition rate is.
When they start to analyze how many of their seemingly active clients are actually inactive, they can’t believe how high the number is.
Through my experience, on average, this figure is usually no lower than 25% and sometimes as high as 75%.
Let’s analyze this for a few minutes.
If you started a year ago with 1,000 clients buying from you, the odds are that at least 250 of those clients, and could be as high as 750, are not longer buying regularly from you.
And the tragic part is that most business owners don’t even recognize that fact. This in itself could lead to financial ruin and lost profits. But it could also lead to an opportunity.
Here’s the good news…
The majority of those lost prospects can be won back with very little effort. With such large numbers of lost clients, you’re sitting on a huge untapped gold mine just waiting to be found.
Before I go into the reasons why clients stop purchasing from your business, you must figure out clearly and accurately, what your attrition rate is. What percentage of your previously active clients are no longer active.
Once you know this number, you can begin to ask the next very important question. WHY?
There are really only four primary reasons people or companies stop buying regularly from a business.
- The client no longer has a need for your product or service.
- The client had a bad experience with your company, product, or service.
- Something happened in the client’s life that caused an interruption, and they forgot about you.
- The client believes another product or service serves their needs better.
Before I go into these in greater detail, I want to go over a very important concept that, if done, will lower the percentage of lost clients.
Make Top Quality a Top Priority
By making sure that quality is your top priority in everything you do, you will keep your current clients happy and above all, keep them from becoming inactive clients.
At all times, strive for the highest possible quality in the products and services you sell, and also in the work of everyone who works for you.
I’ve written in prior issues about developing your Unique Selling Proposition, and I hope that you will resolve to make high quality an integral part of it.
If you sell a product, make it the best and most useful product you can create. If you sell a service, extend yourself to the absolute maximum.
You cannot satisfy everyone, but if your client has a problem, try to resolve it as favorably in his or her mind as possible.
When you make quality a top priority, you will start demanding so much more out of yourself, and your business will skyrocket.
Always remember to put maximum quality into every part of your business. Your clients will reward you for doing it.
Contact with clients, active or inactive, is something you can’t overdo. Unless you stay in close and constant communication with your clients, you won’t know what is happening in their lives, and that information is invaluable to you.
Let me give you an example of what I had.
I needed to replace a sofa that was destroyed by my children. My wife and I went to the local furniture store and after looking for what seemed like hours, we just couldn’t find one similar to the one we had.
The salesman then brought out catalogs and after finding the sofa we wanted, he checked and found out that the company didn’t know if they had the material still in stock and they will get back to him.
My wife and I left, expecting to hear from him shortly. Two weeks later, while shopping in another mall, we went into another furniture store, inquired about the catalog, and the salesman called and found out that the material we wanted was indeed in stock. Naturally, we placed our order immediately.
When I called the other salesman back, he said he was still waiting for the manufacturer to call him.
He lost our sale, because he didn’t follow up like he should have followed up.
Well, that’s it for this issue. If you need step-by-step instructions on how to implement this and other ideas I give on creating customers, simply go to this training page.
Feeling Stuck In Your Practice?
Check out my new book Stellar Marketing. I reveal new ways to tap into the hidden psychology of customer desire. Do this and you’ll turn even the most skeptical prospect into a loyal, raving fan.
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