Stumbled Upon Insight: The Life-Raft Of Business Turnaround Or Short Cut To A Better Ship?

Ever had a blinding flash of the blinking obvious? An insight that stopped you in your tracks?

Perhaps so obvious, you immediately kicked yourself hard as punishment for ignoring what's staring you in the face.

That's how I feel today. And this is extremely useful for struggling businesses, new businesses, and even established businesses before they take a voyage of complacency towards an iceberg.

The answer, is your clients. They are the source of salvation. The liferaft from the sinking ship.

Especially important to consider while you're at the bow of the ship on a luxury voyage. You'll be having too much fun to notice that your customers may have taken a plane elsewhere.

They are the reason you are there. Above you or the senior officer in your business.

Personally, I can see complacency rearing its ugly head if we're not careful. We went bust and started again. We're growing again. So it's time to stamp on complacency, take a moment away from distractions, and focus again on the clients.

What do they want? Is it the same as last time we asked?

Just Contemplating This, I Unearthed A Magic Wand Anyone Can Use

It's obvious. In fact so obvious, you'd be amazed how few people do this. But before I reveal what it is, I'll ask you if the next sentence sounds familiar or something you'd expect someone setting up a new venture is likely to think AND do:

Focus on new clients. Market like hell and make sure each and every new customer gets a brilliant first impression, and is highly delighted with what you've done or the product they've just bought.

And there's nothing wrong with this at all. In fact, it's strongly recommended.

Your existing clients though can't be forgotten or neglected. They still need the same attention. The same great product or service they got first time around.

Humour me for a minute, and while it may sound very obvious, I'll explain why this is important:

1) They refer other clients to you

2) You spent a fortune on marketing for them to find you

3) It is therefore far cheaper to keep them happy (referrals/word-of-mouth), and ask them to buy again

With your happy clients, the hard work has been done. It is far easier to keep a client happy. It's also far cheaper than recruiting new clients.

And because they're happy, they are likely to buy again. Imagine you had a minor car accident that wasn't your fault. After you had reported it, your solicitor ensured you had a courtesy car for relatives to visit you in hospital while you recovered.

In fact, they visited you in hospital and subsequently to take necessary details of your case. They absorbed all of the costs, kept you informed at every stage of the claims process, and made sure compensation due to you was paid speedily.

In other words they delivered a fantastic service.

Would you mind if they sent you a letter offering a will-writing service? Or sent you an email to let you know they could also assist with house sales should you ever move home?

It's not exactly heavy sell is it? They have already proved their excellent service, so if you did need them again, why shop around?

Now that solicitor has paid a small fortune advertising themselves. It may cost the equivalent of a few hundred pounds for every accident claim they process.

But it only costs them a few pence to send you a letter, and nothing bar a little time to send you an email.

So why do so few people sell to their clients?

I'm guilty of this. I realise it's important, but it's not been top of my agenda for a while.

But it can be rude not to sell. If one of our clients needed us to set them up to work from home, how rude would it be not to tell them we do that?

They trust us. We do a great job. We're bound to be cheaper than anyone else because we know their office set-up and can get them connected to it remotely pretty fast.

Like many people though, we've fallen into the trap of not selling. Perhaps because we're a little too polite at times, and selling is often frowned upon.

But that isn't true. We don't like the in-your-face approach when someone knocks on your door selling double-glazing.

We don't know them and therefore there's no trust. And they don't often know if we're interested. Worse, they drag you away from a comfy lie down in front of the box after a hard day's work.

Your clients though have bought from you before. They know you and trust you. And you know they're interested because they've bought from you before.

The Client Matrix - How Can A Magic Wand Be So Simple?

Imagine you run a plumbing service. You advertise. People use you.

You're good, so people recommend you.

So keep a good client database. Gather first names. Email addresses. And more importantly, record what they've bought from you.

This little example shows you how a client matrix works. Now think about what you'd write and who to. I'd be writing to all the "Sue Jones" type people in the database. They've had an emergency call-out, but they don't have an annual boiler service.

I'd include quotes and testimonials from people who following an emergency call-out were determined to prevent it happening again. And because they were so happy with the service when their plumbing experts rescued them, it was the natural choice.

Now I'd switched off from selling. But I've realised that one of our goals is to help our small business clients to prevent IT support rather than fix it.

And to reach that goal, it would be a good idea to construct a similar matrix. In other words, a list of all the things that stop bad stuff happening, make things work better or make them more productive.

Many of these things we won't do. But by recommending they buy the right stuff, it will make our lives and theirs far better.

Can you do the same for your business? What do you think?

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