Random musings: Are you giving your clients away to your competition?

Wednesday, November 28, 2018

Are you giving your clients away to your competition?

"Of course not," you say. "I'm doing everything I can to keep them!" But are you? "I love my clients and they love me." Do they know that?

Let me ask you this: when you started your business did you immediately have all the clients you needed? I'm guessing probably not. You had to work for them. Work hard. It wasn't always easy to convince them to leave the person they were doing business with and to start doing business with you. But why did they leave? It may have been because of your price or level of service but usually it's because they think the person they were doing business with didn't care about them anymore. When they were a prospect they were wined and dined, and told how wonderful they were. Now, they don't hear anything at all from them except maybe a request to buy more of their stuff.

And now your current clients are someone else's prospects...being wined and dined, and told how wonderful they are...while hearing nothing from you!

It's said that 68% of customers leave because of perceived indifference...combine that with the 9% who leave because they are persuaded to go with the competition, you have more than three-quarters going away and probably to your competition.

Another statistic is that you lose 10% of your influence for every month that your clients don't hear from you. At first, your client may say "I have a guy (or gal)" but after a few months they're not so sure. It also takes 5 - 12 exposures for someone to make a buying decision. If your competitors reach out to them 5 - 12 times and they haven't heard from you in awhile, then guess what?

So, what can you do about it? I suggest making a list of your top 100 clients and if you don't have that many, then include your prospects and influencers that you know and reach out to them several times a year, if not every month. And the easiest way to do that is with a system like SendOutCards. SendOutCards lets you reach out to your list automatically...you just have to create your list and then decide what cards you want the system to send to them...automatically.