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Love the Customers You Have:
How to Tap Into Those Great Customer Relationships, to Increase Revenues
and Profits
By Sarah Woods
One of the most common questions among business owners and corporate leaders is “How can we increase revenues?” The answer might be to build sales, expand market share, extend product offerings, or reduce expenses. The formulas are the same among most companies. But what can differentiate you is your ability to leverage what works into revenue growth.
Here’s what you can’t influence – the economy, the business climate in your industry, what your competition is doing, and to some extent, the resources you have to work with. So what can you influence? The answer lies with your customers.
It is human nature to equate growth with change. After all, it’s been said that “if the shoe fits, you’re not allowing for growth.” However, consider the missed opportunity for growth if you view increasing sales as a purely linear process… asking only “who else needs our products or services?” Most companies invest their marketing budgets on extending the company’s reach by providing “air-cover” for sales efforts, and teeing up new opportunities. But one of the most overlooked yet richest sources of new revenue comes from your existing customer base.
Your satisfied customers already buy in to the value you offer. Your unsatisfied customers bought in, but were disappointed. Within both groups are ripe opportunities for new revenues…but you must tap them. How will you increase revenues? By reconnecting with your customers, and building long-term value that will generate new business repeatedly over the life of those relationships.
So instead of racking your brain to uncover undiscovered markets, follow some simple steps to leverage what works:
- Put in the time and money to know your customers. If you don’t have a database that gives you easy access to who’s buying your product or service, build one…it’ll pay you back in spades.
- Mine your data. Use the resources you have to know who’s buying WHAT, WHEN, WHY and HOW. Whether you have comprehensive data on purchasing history and customer satisfaction indices or simply an accounts receivable report, you have information you can use to build new sales.
- Get back in touch. Your sales organization would love nothing more than to reconnect with a happy customer…if they only knew who they were. Believe it or not, they would also love nothing more than to talk with an unhappy one. Every unhappy customer is an opportunity.
- Get strategic. If they bought that product or service then, they may need this product or service NOW. Know the lifecycle of what you offer, and the prompts in your current customer’s life when the next cycle will come around. THAT’S your moment of opportunity. Help them plan for it.
- Become a partner…you’ll gain an advocate. If the name of the game is increasing the VALUE of the relationship with your customer base over the life of that relationship – do so by knowing how to solve their problems before they know they have them.
Every business has a wealth of new revenues that lie untapped year after
year in the file cabinets and databases of their organization. You have
the opportunity to either leverage that unparalleled resource, or let it
languish and ultimately, dissolve. As the 19th century novelist George Elliot
said, “The strongest principle of growth lies in human choice”.
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