“Every business needs to build relationships and provide information if they have long-term growth goals.”
~ Debra Hilton
Nothing helps you clarify your goals and refine your processes like wondering how you can service all your existing clients. This is just as true for service businesses who have genuine delivery constraints as it is for larger companies and product-based businesses whose constraints are less obvious.
I’ve recently been working with a product-focused business that has historically had a steady flow of clients rather than being on your classic ‘Feast-Famine Rollercoaster’. The past few years they’ve been focusing on building a recurring revenue model rather than sales + emergency solutions, and growing quite steadily so it wasn’t until there was quite a dramatic disruption in their industry that they started to focus aggressively on building a list of qualified leads well beyond their delivery capacity.
The outcome has been quite extraordinarily reassuring. Six months ago they were facing a pipeline that was barely trickling leads, today they have a waiting list of eager new clients, as well as a nurture list of potential prospects.
What they did that made the difference is outlined below…
Building a Continuing Relationship with Qualified Leads…
It doesn’t matter what business you are in in today’s world if you are not engaged in directly marketing to your customers on a variety of levels then you are jeopardising your future prospects. This is as true in industry and manufacturing as it is in service businesses including software, consulting, medical, financial and other services.
You should always qualify your leads and segment them according to suitability because it makes absolute sense to invest your resources in the following order:
- Current Clients;
- Your Highest Probability Prospects;
- Prospects Who Ought to be Interested, but Haven’t Shown Interest Yet;
- Interested (but not especially probable) Prospects;
The principle behind this is that you should never take anyone for granted… including your current clients. I’ve lost count of the businesses who lost their highest value client, the one who “will never leave me,” and got thrown into a tailspin.
The solution is to communicate and add value frequently with all four groups of people listed above if you want to build a stable business that may be of interest to investors or buyers. Doing this takes work, and many business owners don’t want to invest the resources it takes, but it almost magically creates profitable stability that lasts.
Before you say, that won’t work for my business…
Let’s Look at the Possibilities in Front of You…
The business I referred to above sells high-value equipment to government and industry and when I first started working with them they had a catalogue which they offered to enquirers.
Here’s some of the things we did:
- We advertised the catalogue in advertisements. The replies not only built our list, but told us which media our prospects were consuming most and helped us direct future advertising spend.
- We immediately started weekly emails talking about the products to engage our list. It was surprising how much response this generated in terms of questions, enquiries, and sales.
- We reached out to the third group of prospects who we knew should be exploring our products and invited them to request our catalogue (at first), and later our book. We sent offers via mail to these people rather than emails and didn’t invest much until they demonstrated interest.
- We ran live information days and customer appreciation days that were designed to help clients get more out of their investment. We were surprised at how popular these were as we’d been told everyone would be too busy to come. Our customers also were great at selling to prospects at these events.
- Articles published on our website and mirrored on other sites generated more leads. We’d assumed that no one would be really interested in the subject but it turned out that we got a lot of organic traffic exploring the problems and solutions we talked about.
- We advertised for staff… targeting our ads as tightly as we planned our articles and product advertisements. Not only did we have great people responding, we also had prospects and clients who realised that “if we were looking for people who did [that thing], then our product had even greater value.”
- We made special monthly offers via mail to our clients that were not available to the wider list.
What Does it Take to Execute?
It’s important to approach this process strategically and think about your specific industry and situation. It also makes sense to carefully segment your list so that people receive offers relevant to their needs and interest, but at the same time, you should not make unfounded assumptions.
Like any business-building initiative this takes some investment both at the strategic level and in execution. When you’re emailing and writing articles weekly you need to ensure that these are relevant, helpful, and interesting to your target audience and unless you have a staff-writer with extra time on their hands you’ll probably need some outside assistance from a qualified copywriter. When I quote prospects on this work, I often hear a gasp of shock as they think about the expense. A few weeks or months later, as the results emerge on their balance sheet and they see the effect in their sales, the response is quite different.
The biggest mistake I see businesses make is investing in these resources without determining how to deploy them in advance. If you follow that path then you can end up wasting your money.
