Supply Leaders Academy

Take Care Of Customer Relationships Before Asking For The Referral

22.01.12 08:36 PM By Randall Mauldin
Copyright copy; 2012 Dawn Westerberg Consulting LLC Ask any business owner and theyll tell you that referrals are the best source for generating new business. But how does your customer feel if they havent heard from you in a long time and now here you are asking for a referral? Being proactive about your customer relationships is not only beneficial for cultivating referrals, its preventative medicine when it comes to customer defection. Most customers defect to a competitor due to perceived indifference on the part of their current solution provider or vendor. Ive heard statistics as high as over 70 percent. Defection due to price or finding superior product generally occurs at a much lower rate. So the critical question is what are you doing to show your customers that you care? What do you do proactively to show that you care about them and the success of their business? Heres another measure - think back over the last 30 days. How much of your customer interaction has been reactive? How much of your customer interaction has been proactive? If reactive outweighs the proactive, youve got a problem. That holiday card you sent is not enough. That monthly e-newsletter is not enough. They are part of the overall mix of things that serve to communicate with customers. But its a good idea to add another level of communication that acknowledges thin individual. Your outreach must be genuine and personal. Genuine and personal efforts take time. However, genuine and personal communication has tremendous impact. Think about an instance when someone took the time to write you a personal note, or took the time to thank you for your business in a very specific way. Its not a blur. You recall exactly the person who took the time to communicate solely with you. Here are some things that you could begin doing immediately to be more proactive, genuine and personal with your customers. Commit to one call a day Print out a list and commit to calling 5 customers a week just to check in and find out if what you implemented for them is working well for them. Chances are you will get voice mail, thats OK. Leave a concise message telling them that you want to know how they are doing, how the products and services theyve purchased from you are working, and how thankful you are for their business. Strive to have lunch once a week with a customer Once a week, take a customer out for lunch. This allows for quality face to face time. Find out what their experience with your products and services has been. Find out if there are new challenges that they are facing. Find out more about them as a person - are they passionate about a charity (in the future you might consider making a donation in their honor), do they belong to any professional groups or associations that they have found valuable (it might make sense for you to join these groups), the point is focus on getting to know them better. Segment your customers Prioritize your list of customers based on how profitable, delightful, reference-able they are and every other week send one person on the list a business book that youve found particularly helpful. Include a note with the book that shares what you found interesting about the topic and slip a business card between the pages. Send a handwritten note Keep a stack of postcards or note cards (preferably with your logo on it) by your computer and drop a personalized note to a customer every day. Thank them for their business. Congratulate them on some accomplishment (new certification, recent publicity, etc.) Get started! All of these activities are steps you can take immediately. Not only will you cultivate a better relationship - less susceptible to defection and more conducive to referrals - youll probably uncover a number of projects that you can do for them. a href=http://dawnwesterberg.com/Dawn Westerberg/a invites business owners to fall in love with your business again through sound marketing strategies that bring results and profits. An Authorized a href=http://dawnwesterberg.com/duct-tape-marketing/Duct Tape Marketing Consultant/a Dawn Westerberg serves clients throughout the United States and Canada.