Episode 009 Balance Between Selling To The New And Servicing The Old

Introduction
Today’s topic focuses on how much do you need to focus on customer acquisition versus customer retention. 

How much time do you allocate to acquiring customers versus retaining current customers. 
How much of a budget do we allocate to acquiring customers?
How much of our marketing budget do we allocate to customer retention?
Can we build systems that help automate acquisition?
Can we implement systems to help sell more products and services to current customers?
Is there a balance between customer acquisition and customer retention?

Show Objectives – The Why
3 Ways to Increase Revenue

• Acquire New Customers, Increase Average Transaction Size, Increase Frequency Customers 

Current Customers

1. It costs 8-10 times more to acquire a new customer versus retaining a current customer.
2. Spend More
3. At Higher Price Points
4. Cost Less to Serve
5. Tell others about you. Think word of mouth and referrals
6. Once You understand who your best customers are its easier to attract more people like them

Overall marketing budget percentages towards acquisition vs retention?  
Acquisition – 
Are there automated ways to generate prospects, and how can we convert them into first time customers?

Retention – 
Once prospects purchase, how can we lead them to purchasing multiple times to become advocates. How can we use automation to achieve this? 

Key Issues- Owner Perspective: 

1. review the marketing & sales process for improvement to handle fast or hyper sales growth – building it robust enough,
2. build processes for servicing the customer post sale – building it robust enough, 
3. how to track the balance between effort spent closing deals with first time customers – and effort spent on service accounts closed to create opportunities for upselling.

What You Need to Know – Customer Acquisition – 
Lead Generation – Lead magnets and landing pages 

Facebook ads to generate leads and sales 
Dedicated/Solo emails – 
Being a guest on other people’s platform- podcasts, Facebook & YouTube Lives, contribute content to their site blog posts, newsletter articles. 
How can you add value to the person’s audience?
Creating Your Own Content for social media, website, etc. building your own audiences. 

Converting Leads to Customers – 
Low price point upsells – books, reports, smaller items and services where customers can get a taste and experience what it is like to do business with you. 

Sales Pages on your website

What You Need to Do – Customer Retention 

Automated Selling Systems- shopping carts that have these features. 
Upsells & Cross sells
Higher price point products- Follow up with Phone Calls, and Zoom meetings. Conversations Lead to Conversions 
Email Newsletters & Promotional Emails 
Facebook ads targeting specific customers with specific offers
Direct Mail- Sequences
Customer Rewards Programs

Develop systems that automate some of these processes so the company can scale. 

Shows
Previous: Episode C3.008 Identify New Users for Existing Offer  
Next: Episode C3.010 Customer Recovery

Written by Charles George

IBGR 0:06
This is William Eastman managing partner for Growth Works Media and station director for IBGR. One of my job’s is finding great on air talent, consultants and business owners with a presence and a story to tell. We’re expanding our broadcast team to represent our four core time zones North America, Australia, New Zealand, Singapore and the Philippines, the Indian subcontinent and the last four, United Kingdom, Ireland, Europe and Africa. If you are a small business consultant or business owner would like to audition for an on air slot in our six hour show cycle, contact the station director and that is that programming@ibgr.network, we will respond to your email within one business day. Thanks for listening, and don’t miss this great opportunity to put the world back to work and grow with us.

AD 0:59
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Simone Douglas 2:36
Okay, and we’re back you are listening to the IBGR.network. More than a radio station, you are now part of a global business family dedicated to helping you achieve your goals. And I am your host for today’s session Simone Douglas. This is episode eight in our C lane IBGR.network sales and marketing, you can go to our website at IBGR.network and download the show notes to catch you up on the show so far. So now we’re moving on to what you need to know about balancing between selling to the new and servicing the old when it comes to your customer base. So we talked a little bit about analysing your customer ratios. Research shows that growing companies prioritise Customer Success more than stagnating ones and that increasing retention by 5% actually increases profits anywhere from 25 to 95%. Perhaps the most straightforward of customer retention metrics your company’s customer churn rate refers to the rate at which customers stopped doing business with you where the customer has ended, or opted out of renewing the subscription or cancelled a retainer or simply stopped ordering with you. A change customer is a customer that your business unsuccessfully retained. With that said attrition in your customer base is natural to a certain degree. Companies are acquired or they go out of business they hire an internal resource or they no longer need your product or service. But if your annual churn rate is greater than 5 to 7%, it’s time to evaluate the happiness of your customers and why there may be a problem. And unreasonably high churn rate is typically indicative of your product or service failing to meet the customers expectations or goals. Additionally, churn rate is sometimes confused with retention. However, the two metrics are distinctly different. Retention rate is the ratio of customers that returned to do business at your company. This differs from churn rate because churn rate refers to the number of customers you’ve lost over a period of time. A company with a high churn rate would by default have a lower retention right. We also need to actually start looking at how you are mix your customer ratio from like new customers to existing customers balances against your stage of evolution as a company … research revealed four groups of companies which they named running in place, rockets, healthy grown ups and old cash cows. As a C3 company, generally speaking, you fall into that healthy grown up stage. And look at the characteristics they have in common offers some insights into the preferred customer revenue mix and the dynamics through which a healthy customer revenue mix promotes growth or hinders it. If we look at a running in place, or a typical startup company, generally speaking, 10% of their customer mix are going to be existing customers and 90% are going to fall into that new customer bracket. If you’re in that rocket phase, you’re going to be more like 30% existing customers and 70% new customers, but the healthy grownups at their peak will be sitting in that 70% bracket. So 70% existing customers that you’re maintaining and building on those relationships and 30% to 20% of brand new customers, when you get to that old cash cow, that’s a very stable business that you’re almost ready to sell, because it’s working so well. That tends to be 90% existing customers and a 10% new customer base. So it’s just good to bear that in mind. So what is your customer mix? When was the last time that you evaluated and had a really solid look at what it is that you’re doing in terms of putting on those customers?

The other thing that we need to get some clarity around is what retention and acquisition strategies do we have in place, and what are we missing? So acquisition and retention are the two key drivers of growth. And they’re like two wings of a bird. If either one is missing, then flight becomes impossible. In the same way, you need to both acquire and then retain customers in order to achieve success. Granted, acquisition and retention drive growth in different ways. For instance, acquisition grows, your customer base is fairly obvious that without any customers to serve, there is no reason for a company to exist in the first place, you had to acquire at least a few customers in order to launch your business. And now the ongoing process of customer acquisition allows you to grow your customer base and obtain even more opportunities to conduct business. Retention also grows lifetime customer value or LTV. So LTV is the projected value of that customer over the entire course of his relationship with your company. It’s no secret that loyal customers who consistently purchase from your brand are almost always more valuable to your company than one time buyers. A strong customer retention strategy enables you to maximise the lifetime value of your customers by encouraging them to bring their business back to you again and again. So it will become important that you have multiple touchpoints with your existing customers to remind them that you’re there and what it is that you’re selling. Maybe your products have evolved or your services have changed, or you’ve added new things into the mix. How are you communicating all of those things? And what are your strategies in terms of taking that to a new market, like we talked about last week, or taking it to your existing market and leveraging off the relationships that you have with them to both grow your business with them, but also grow the referrals that they send through to you. So like any good business, it all comes down to human to human connection and relationships. And that’s going to be a good mark, good market and indicator of your success in this kind of experience. The other thing to bear in mind is that acquisition is more expensive to a company.

Statistics vary from industry to industry, but research indicates that customer acquisition is far more expensive venture than retention. In fact, it may cost up to five times more to acquire a new customer than to keep an existing one. Why is such a huge difference? When it comes to new customers, remember, you’re basically starting from scratch. They likely have no previous experience with the brand and may not even trust your company. It takes time and money to interest them in your product and even more time and money to convince them to buy from me. With current customers you don’t have to fight as against as many barriers to the transaction. So retention has a better return on investment. In many cases, the upfront costs of customer acquisition make many business customer relationships unprofitable in the beginning, so it has to turn into a long term business relationship in order for you to recoup those upfront acquisition costs. It may only be several months or even years later with strong retention processes in place that these relationships generate those significant returns. In fact, One study found that a 5% increase in retention rates may lead to a profit increase of up to 95 percent. The point is that customer becomes more valuable over time and a robust retention strategy will enable you to keep your customers longer. happy customers also boost your word of mouth. Word of mouth marketing is one of the most effective forms of advertising. For example, One study found that 92% of global consumers trust the referral of a friend, family member or acquaintance over any form of corporate advertising. So when you retain your current customers, by delivering exceptional service and high quality results, they’re more likely to be happy with the relationship. And when they are happy with the relationship, they are more likely to advocate for your company to others. In affect your retention feeds into your acquisition. You don’t have to pay a dime for the positive publicity. Also, we need to think about what are our processes for the customer journey with the team? So you signed the deal and now you have a sale? What kind of customer have you got? Have you identified their personality type and matched them with the best account manager in your team? Or will the person who dealt with them as a prospect maintain the account over its lifetime? If they came in as a direct referral to somebody in the team, how is this handed off without making the customer seem like they’ve been handled? And what are the high level touch points that you are going to put in place with your strategy to ensure that the customers feel like they are of maximum importance rather than just a number, and dollar signs at the end of the day. How you handle this entire process of you customer journey is going to be critical to that retention, and growth of your internal customers. So it’s something that you need to evaluate quite closely.

Also, balancing resource allocation and automation to keep everyone happy and maintain growth. So you’ll often hear me talk about the fact that I’m not a massive fan of marketing automation, mostly because I think people get it wrong. So when they automate their emails and things, they don’t segment their data, particularly well, they don’t have some clarity around personalisation of that automation. And they tend to blanket email people. So if I get 50 emails from 50, companies that I do business with, and none of those emails are tailored to me that ends up being noise in my inbox, as opposed to being something that’s a benefit to me that I can actually engage with and make the most of. So you actually need to look at your the time resources that you have available with your team and how you allocate those resources, what their tasks are, that contribute to both acquisition and to retention. You know, how much of their time is spent prospecting versus massaging existing relationships and continuing to be friends, because all of those things will become particularly important. One of the other things that you probably need to have a look at at this point is where are you sourcing your new customers from? So as enquiries are coming in, are you paying really clear attention to what the best sources of referrals are, or inquiry is that your website is generating most of that for you? Is it your social media marketing? What types of content are you putting out there are and what platforms that are successfully creating those opportunities for you, because all of those things will be supportive of your outcomes that you’re trying to achieve as well. So we’re going to take a short two minute break very shortly when we return, we’re going to cover up on the how, how we get to know our customers, what we need to do in the face of the data and how we execute this balanced strategy or this magical silver bullet that is going to have us growing, being profitable, acquiring just the right amount of new clients that we can happily service and maintain our growth while building those relationships with our existing customers. All of those things are going to be very important if you’re going to continue to go to the next stage in navigate from C3 to C4.

Did you know that all of these season’s episodes are available on demand in our community of commerce, you can get the complete one hour show in our community of commerce instead of just the first 15 minutes segment in our podcast live playlist. Don’t miss the action steps in the third and fourth segments that you need to grow your business. Our complete sales and podcast is located in our community of commerce. You just go to our website at IBGR.network and click the Join Us tab, and then click the link to community to get immediate access to the entire season. You’ve been listening to episode 8.

AD 0:02
Is your CRM making your business grow? When surveyed, about 90% of business leaders admit that their CRM isn’t the most common cause for that salespeople don’t use their CRM the way they should. Why not? Well, it takes them too much time and discipline to fill out the CRM completely, and if sales people don’t, the CRM system becomes useless. That’s why when we started sales, where we asked ourselves, what if we built a CRM system that fills out itself? What if you build a system that serves existing data so that you know and remember all about your customers and never forget and disappointed not only that’s what sales really does today, it pulls in all the data buried in your emails, email signatures, calendar, phone, social data, company database, email, web tracking, and offers it to you in an easy way. So you and your CRM are always up to date. Want to see this for yourself, head to salesware.com and get your free trial.

IBGR 1:05
This is William Eastman from Growth Works Media and Station Director IBGR. If you listen to any of our broadcasts, you know we consider all entrepreneurs part of one family. People who are the heroes of our societies because they put their soul into the game and risk failure for everybody else. We want to meet and get to know everyone like having a family. Plus, to provide the highest quality of programming we need to hear from you. The place to start is to become a subscriber. Every week, we will send you our broadcasting schedule, links to show notes, and occasionally a gift like something practical from our toolbox. It is simple to do go to our Join Us page sign up and become part of the most important global community. Entrepreneurs never forget, we create over 50% of the jobs around the world. We look forward to meeting you.

Simone Douglas 2:34
Okay, and we’re back you are listening to the IBGR.network. More than a radio station you are now part of a global business family dedicated to helping you achieve your goals. And your host today for today’s show, Simone Douglas. This is episode eight in our C lane at IBGR.network sales and marketing, you can go to our website at IBGR network and download the show notes to catch you up if you’re just joining us. And we’re talking today all about balancing between selling to the new and servicing the old when it comes to your customer base. You can listen live four times per day. If you’re in Toronto, Canada, it is from two to 3pm Sydney, Australia from 10am to 11, Mumbai, India, you have the night shift 11:30pm to 12:30am. And London England you have me for the lunch hour 1pm to 2. So we’re moving on now to what you need to do, so the how when it comes to all these things that we’ve been talking about today. So the first thing that we want to look at again, is basic customer ratio calculations to health check your exposure, or your opportunity. So this is where we really get down to business. So your general manager or your sales teams should know these and be working towards improving them. If you are the owner of the business or the CEO, you definitely should know these and understand whether you’re trending in the right direction when it comes to them. So the first thing that we look at is annual churn rate. So yeah, annual churn rate equals the number of customers at the start of the year, minus the number of customers at the end of the year, divided by the number of customers at the start of the year. You can also calculate out your monthly revenue churn rate as well. So monthly revenue churn rate equals monthly revenue rate at the start of the month minus monthly revenue rate at the end of the month, then minus the monthly revenue rate in upgrades during the month for those customers that have upgraded what it is that they are doing with you. And then you divide all of that by the monthly revenue rate at the start of the month. So existing customer revenue growth rate is very important for your business. A climbing rate would imply that your marketing sales and account teams are doing a great job at motivating customers to increase their spending. It also means that your customers are quickly realising the value from your engagement. Conversely, a floundering or falling growth rate should put your success team on alert. New customer ratios also fall into this section. And it basically means customer dollars for the month versus existing customer dollars expressed as a percentage of overall sales. So we need to have some clarity around all of these things. And if you go back to what we were talking about earlier, we’re looking for that sweet spot, really, of 70% existing customers generating revenue and 30% new customers generating new revenue as your business is steadily growing. So we also want to say that we have a sales growth happening like percentage happening, and then also that that is flowing straight down to the bottom line. So you also, you know, in the operations track that we run on another day here, you would get your head around making sure what all of your variable and fixed costs were on the way through so that you’re growing the right customers that flowing straight through to the bottom line. So we need to complete a review of resource allocation to account management versus acquisition. So, acquisition does boost our vanity metrics when it comes to marketing. So customer acquisition campaigns often result in eye popping numbers. More visitors on the page, more daily active users, and it’s easy for us as marketers to point to such statistics of success. However, as the name implies, vanity metrics look great on the surface, but they don’t provide any actionable insight into future strategy. So the results of acquisition campaigns are more quickly evident as well. Customer retention is a long term process with results that may take years to come to fruition. In contrast, acquisition campaigns offer quick and easy measurements for success. For example, new users is a simple metric that can be seen immediately. Basically, many companies use customer acquisition campaigns as the marketing equivalent of instant gratification without pausing to consider if they really constitute the best use of funds. So you really do need to balance the two. If your budget is particularly constrained right now, in the current climate, you really want to focus on retention. So as mentioned previously, customer retention yields a higher return on investment for marketing spend. While acquisition is important for long term growth, the initial costs associated with getting new customers may be too high for your company right now, if you’re operating within a tight budget, so it’s a great time to start leveraging those existing customers. We also need to look at what are the touch points that we’re maintaining with our existing customers? Which ones are personal and which ones are automated? Are we actually executing them? Or do we just put them in our strategy document and then forget about them and leave it to somebody else? It’s highly likely if your churn rates or retention rates are high, or sorry, your retention rate is low, and your churn rate is high, then these touch points are probably falling down, or the service experience that your customers are having is not great. So now, as previously discussed a couple of weeks ago, what you want to be doing is checking out your net promoter scores and surveying your existing customer base to make sure that they will fall in that Promoter Score. If they don’t, if they’re falling into the detractors score, and you thought you had a great relationship with them, you probably have four weeks to fix it, if you’re lucky, maybe only two. So it’s important that we’re consistently touching base and asking those questions to assess whether our customers are really happy. One of the best things you can do as a business owner is routinely cherry pick a couple of key clients and just send them an unsolicited email saying, Hey, I just thought I’d check in to see how Gary or whoever their account rep is, is going looking after your account. Are you happy? Is there any feedback that you’d give us for continuous improvement, that’s usually a great way to open the door to have a conversation about what the issues are. So we also need to look at who has the best retention in the organisation as a whole and why so there will always be somebody in your organisation that over and above everybody else seems to keep their clients forever. Find out what it is they’re doing that makes them so personable. Why are they being so successful with their clients? And is that something that you can train the rest of your team to do? Have they uncovered the bits that should be part of your strategy that you’re not doing across the organisation? So this is something that is easy to learn from the people that are already doing it successfully. We also want to identify who in the organisation has the best acquisition ratio to lead and why so who is it that’s closing most of the deals and the new customer acquisitions. Again. Is it something that they’re doing? Or is it a process that they do that differs from everybody else? What are the one percenters here that we’re missing that we could take advantage of? So all of those things will help you make the most out of what it is that you’re trying to do. And then last of all, we actually need to sit down and make a list and review all of your marketing plans for acquisition and retention, and identify opportunities for improvement. So if you look at all of the communication that you’re sending out to everybody, how often are you ticking that box in the retention bracket? How are you moving those customers along in their journey with you and keeping them close to you? How are you making them feel special? Is it email marketing? Are you randomly sending them text messages? Is it something to do specific offers or pages on the website that are geared towards those existing relationships? Or is it social media content that you’re generating that what you’re having conversations with your customers and giving them brand exposure through your digital channels? How can you support building those relationships over time? You also want to have a look at your acquisition strategies, and do you have clarity around who you’re trying to sell to, where you’re trying to sell to them, and the messaging that you’re putting out there and again, your digital channels all need to have a balance of acquisition, tone of voice and retention, tone of voice, some of your retention pieces that you put out are actually going to give potential new customers a better indication of whether or not they’re going to want to work with you as a company or an organisation. Simply based on the way that you talk about and talk to and work with your existing customers. So even documenting those things, and sharing your success stories in a way that makes the customer the hero will increase that balance for you in terms of, you know, and getting the most out of things. So making sure that you have all of those touch points in place, a really robust sales and marketing plan is going to kind of pull all of those things together as well as looking at things like where you going out and networking. Who is it that is the face of your business, and how you growing their personal brand. What strategic alliances, ar your key account reps and your sales reps forming with different people in the marketplace, and how is that setting the business up for success? Again, you’re going to also though, need to be looking at how you’re spending your time, effort and energy as an organisation. So this it needs to be some kind of a tracking process in place, whether it’s timely or something like that, where you can actually pick up who’s doing what and when, and at a glance in a dashboard be able to see, okay, 60% of my time right now is spent on acquisition and that skewed because that means that we’re dropping the ball on the retention. So how are we maintaining those relationships, all of those things are going to be really important.

So we’re getting ready to take a short two minute break directly. When we return, we’ll bring it all together and look at why any of the things that we’ve covered so far matter, and what the direct impact can be to your bottom line when you get it right. Certainly this is one of those things that you really want to make sure that you make the most out of because once you do get it right doing business becomes so much easier. So remember to go to our website, IBGR.network, click the listen now tab and then the show notes. Look for episode c3009. And the show notes will help keep you on track. If you’re looking for more one to one help to grow your business, you can check out our business directory of vetted professionals in all four of our market segments. You go to IBGR.network. Go to the Home tab Us tab and then choose your market segment you’ll see some fantastic professionals who are happy to walk you through. You’ve been listening to episode 9 in our C lane IBGR.network sales and marketing International Business Growth Radio network. I am Simone Douglas and I have been taking you through the balance between selling to the new and servicing the old and we’ll get back to business after a very short break.

IBGR 0:05
This is William Eastman managing partner for Growth Works Media and station director for IBGR. One of my jobs is finding great on air talent, consultants and business owners with a presence and a story to tell. We’re expanding our broadcast team to represent our four core time zones North America, Australia, New Zealand, Singapore and the Philippines, the Indian subc ontinent and the last four, United Kingdom, Ireland, Europe and Africa. If you are a small business consultant or business owner would like to audition for an on air slot in our six hour show cycle, contact the station director and that is that programming@IBGR.network. We will respond to your email within one business day. Thanks for listening and don’t miss this great opportunity to put the world back to work and grow with us.

TThis is William Eastman managing partner for Growth Works Media and station director for IBGR. If you listen to any of our broadcasts, you know we consider all entrepreneurs are part of one family, people who are the heroes of our societies because they put their soul into the game and risk failure for everybody else. We want to meet and get to know everyone like having a family reunion. Plus to provide the highest quality of programming we need to hear from you. The place to start is to become a subscriber. Every week we will send you our broadcasting schedule links to show notes. And occasionally a gift like something practical from our toolbox. It is simple to do go to our Join Us page sign up and become part of the most important global community. Entrepreneurs never forget, we create a 50% of the jobs around the world.

Simone Douglas 2:34
Okay, and we’re back you are listening to the IBGR.network. IBGR is our call sign as a radio station. I’m your host Simone Douglas. This is episode nine in our C lane IBGR.network sales and marketing. Today we are covering balance between selling to the new and servicing the old. If you go to our website, IBGR.network and download the show notes it will catch you up to where we are so far, and give you some good reminders as to what you need to look at when you go away and put these things into practice. So moving right along now we’re at that pointy end what is it that you need to do. So ideally, you are going to equally prioritise both acquisition and retention. All things being equal, every business should focus on both at the same time. Ultimately, they are two sides of the same coin, so in order to successfully grow your business, you must acquire a steady stream of new customers without losing the existing ones. If you develop a realistic marketing strategy that incorporates initiatives for both customer acquisition, and customer retention, and then execute that strategy with the resources you have at hand, you’re likely to enjoy steady and sustainable growth in the near future and for years to come. So remembering that we looked at basic customer ratio calculations to health check your exposure or opportunity. So we’ve covered all of these but just to recap, the ones that you need to go away and calculate for yourself are your annual churn rate, your monthly revenue churn rate, and existing customer revenue growth rate, as well as your new to old customer ratio mix. Then you need to get on with completing the review of resource allocation to account management versus acquisition. This is going to involve time tracking and some analysis. So why should you start a key account management program? Key accounts are 60 to 70% likelier to close the new ones plus spend 33% more on average. According to the Harvard Business Review, customer satisfaction increases 20% within a few years of starting a key account management program. Profits in revenue meanwhile, can increase by 15%. So programs that have been around for five plus years can see results twice that.

What are the touch points that we maintain with our existing customers personal and automated, and are we really executing them, or do we just put them in our strategy document? So moving back and looking at what you’re doing and how you’re doing it, you also need to identify who has the best retention in the organisation and why. Some companies assign their reps as key account managers to one or two customers because because selling or an account management require different mindsets, skills and objectives, this setup isn’t ideal unless your team is prohibitively small. You really want to separate the sales and the account manager roles so that you just have account managers with that focus on retention and then you have sales teams who have a focus on acquisition. Okay, identify who has the best acquisition ratio to lead and why. Key account management are selling a very different, so while a sales person focuses on the short term by necessity, a key account manager prioritises the future. Sales reps also zero in on specific opportunities while key account managers have broader goals including collaborating with the customer on mutually beneficial projects, helping the customer meet their objectives, and making sure the customer is getting the necessary support. So if you don’t have a key account management process in place, you’re probably missing lots of opportunities. So this is definitely something that you need to go away and review. Make a list of and review all of your marketing plans for both acquisition and retention, and identify the opportunities for improvement. Acquiring a new customer can cost five times more than retaining an existing customer. Increasing customer retention by 5% can increase profits from 25 to 95%. And the success rate of selling to a customer you already have is 60 to 70% while the success rate of selling to a new customer tends to be 5 to 20%. By simply automating the process of content marketing, email marketing and social media marketing, you can see success in multiple ways. If you can ensure that the copy in your marketing maintains its human felt sense so that you don’t end up being too corporate, and too clinical. So it can help you see success by staying in touch with your current customer base, reminding your customers of upcoming events and seasonal tips, maintaining a professional appearance all the way to the inbox and beyond and taking advantage of opportunities to reach out to clients who have not talked to in years. If you get it right, it will also see you get more referrals sent your way, which is definitely what we’re looking for. When we look at acquisition from a marketing perspective, this process by which you bring new clients or customers to your business, the goal for any company is to create sustainable and systematic customer acquisition strategies that keep up with the industry trends. So regardless of the size of your business, it’s very important aspect of your business in helping it turn a profit. It also acts as evidence of traction for your business to the outside world, with partners, investors influences and prospects. But what’s the catch? Customer acquisition shouldn’t be confused with lead generation in the world of business, we often visualise the customer journey in the form of a funnel. So leads sit at the top of the funnel, they’re in the awareness and interest phase when it comes to the way that they engage with your business. As they slowly turn into prospects, they start to move through that journey from consideration to intent to evaluation, and then when they finally purchase they become customers. Okay, so all of those things become important. Lead generation makes up that top part of the funnel. Lead acquisition is the middle section and lead conversion is all the way at the bottom. Customer acquisition is the entire end to end process that involves all of these stages. So have you looked at what those strategies are for your customer acquisition? Make sure that you have defined your target audiences? Who is it that you’re trying to talk to? Do you have the right acquisition channels? So are you talking to them where they’re playing and where they’re interested in having a conversation?

Are you leveraging video content? If you’re not creating video content for your business or organisation you are seriously falling behind in terms of marketing and how you go to market. So video needs to form a really big part of your forward planning and current marketing strategies and sales strategies. Is there an opportunity to do giveaways or run promotions of some description or competitions, and can you cross collaborate with existing customers to increase their exposure at the same time? Are you creating high value content regularly that is original and of interest as opposed to just rehashing content that everybody else is putting out there? Have you focused on your search engine optimization? Do you have clarity here about your long tail search terms and your short keyword search terms, both of which are going to form part of how you get discovered. So that top of funnel stage are you running a referral program, so not just a referral program for your existing customers, although that is particularly important as well. You’ve heard me speak before about how it’s important that the gifts or the things that you give as a result of a referral program should always be personalised to the person. So generic gifts and or cash, while they’re lovely, they don’t tend to strengthen a relationship, they’re just considered as Oh, well, thanks very much for that. Whereas when people personalised gifts, and it’s consistent with your personality and your interests, it stands out, you’re also likely to get a lot more social media coverage from that as well. You also need to look at have you created optimised landing pages and improved your website and email engagement. So what are your open rates? What are the different things that are happening there? So all of those things are going to fall into that acquisition strategy basket. Okay, so once you’ve health checked all of that, then we need to start evaluating what’s working and what’s not. So where are the road bumps for your existing customers? As you evaluate all these things, what are the action steps and things that you need to do and change in order to have all of your customers or at least you know, 70% of your existing customers having a great experience with your business? What does that look like? Are there issues currently with communication or with customer experience as people go through the food chain, depending on where they fit and who’s looking after them? Are you regularly running training for your key account managers and your sales team on emotional intelligence and how to actually support the relationships. Do your sales team excel at relationship based selling, or are they solutions based selling? Now both have their place, but a great salesperson can actually have a clear understanding of the difference between one and the other and apply both interchangeably depending on the client. So all of these things will be critical in your success mix, and things that you need to sit down and actually flesh out for your business. Making sure that you have those regular contact points with your existing customers is also going to be critical, so don’t leave them sitting off in space, you know, make sure that you’re reaching out where your teams are reaching out whether it’s automated or otherwise, the best marketing automation always looks like it’s just come direct from the person. So encourage your sales teams just set up email marketing, and the like that speaks in their tone of voice, so that when a customer opens it, they think that they’ve been sent a personalised email. It’s been one of the most successful campaigns I’ve ever done, I send an automated email to my entire database once a year, and it’s plain text and all it says is, ‘Hey there, just thought I’d check in It’s been ages, how’s everything going with business? What’s changed in the last week or so?’ That’s it. And so what I do is I get all these emails back that then like end up updating my database and starting conversations, and when you have 11,000 connections, it’s a really good way to keep you busy in a good way moving forward. So remember that the power of your networks will determine to a large degree what happens on new on your new customer acquisition journey. But the power of your key account managers relationship building skills will be critical in the long game over success.

Next week’s show we’re going to cover the customer recovery journey. And that’s some serious food for thought. How do you save that account or reclaim it and what can you put in place to avoid the pain, so all of these things are very important. Next up, you have the pleasure of listening to the dulcet tones of Mr. William Eastman managing partner of Growth Works Media station director at IBGR and entrepreneurial capitalist. Now who else would you like to listen to today? After all, he’s fabulous. He’s going to be taking you through the story of closed margins for C4 stage companies is super exciting. You have been listening to Seriously Social The Humanistic Approach to Sales and Marketing and episode c3009 balance between selling to the new and servicing the old.