Do you love your customers?

We all know the importance of attracting new customers to grow our business. But if we are losing our existing customers along the way, we must find more and more new ones to stem the tide and get beyond our existing size. And that’s expensive and time-consuming.

Keeping and further expanding the customer accounts we already have is a critical plank in our sales strategy – so it’s worth asking yourself ‘do our customers know how much we value them; do we look after them as well as we could?’ If the answer to either of these questions is ‘no’, or even if you’re not sure of the answer, then you’re probably at risk of losing some of them. So how can we prevent that customer attrition?

Start internally
Take a good, hard look at what you’re delivering for customers, and try to put yourself in their shoes. Are your products/services the best they could be, or just ‘good enough’? Are they delivered on time? Do you make it easy for customers to engage with you? If you aren’t delivering what customers want, to the standard they want, when they want it, there will be competitors eager to tempt them away.

And the other key internal factor is your team. Do they rate your products, and are they proud of and committed to what they do? As the saying goes, look after your people and they will look after your customers, so are you confident you are looking after and motivating your people well enough that they are prepared to go the extra mile for a customer?

Get to know your customers better
Not just your ‘ideal’ customers, or those you are targeting or hope to win, but your real customers – those who buy from you now. Why do they buy from you? What do they really value and how can you ensure you give them more of that? It may be the quality of your product, or it may be the fact you always deliver on time. Or it may be that you always deal with problems well and provide excellent customer service, even if your products are less strong than others on the market?

Understanding why people buy from you can help you lock them in by ensuring whatever it is they value; you focus on continuing to provide as you grow. And will also help you craft your sales and marketing messages to attract more customers like them.

If you’ve never asked them, it’s probably worth doing just that.

Ask yourself – what more could I do?
Now you better understand what your customers want and why they buy from you, take this to the next level. How can you lock them in, how can you delight them?

Can you implement loyalty schemes or longer-term contracts or arrangements with benefits for them and you?

Can you develop what you offer further, based on what they’ve told you? Are there opportunities for innovation in either your product or service or in the way you engage with your customers right the way through the journey from pre-sale to order, to delivery and beyond?

Customer behaviour evolves over time, what they were happy with 5 years ago may now not be good enough, so you need to keep pace. Above all, you’re trying to inspire customer loyalty. So, what makes you go back to a company time and again? And how can you replicate this in your business?

Our team at BHP Consulting have all successfully run businesses, and we understand that every business is unique. Our practical approach to supporting our clients enables us to share our real-world experience to positively impact on the performance of your business. To arrange a call or an exploratory face-to-face meeting, please click here.