1 Use Your Time Productively

You won’t have the time to keep a high level of contact with all of your customers and, in any case, they will not all justify the effort required. We need to discriminate among our customers to retain the best. Draw up a list of those that warrant your time. I have found the “segment and discriminate” approach has worked for many of our clients.

Start by identifying those most important to you. These will be the most profitable, have the greatest potential for future sales because their business is growing, they have dynamic leadership and are in a growth market.

Using these criteria, divide your customers into 3 groups. The most profitable/greatest potential are your Gold prospects; then come the Silver prospects and finally the Bronze group. Apportion your time accordingly - say 50% on the Gold prospects, 35% on the Silver and the remaining 15% on the Bronze. And, of course, start with the Gold prospects now.

2 Take Responsibility

Allocate responsibility for each customer to an individual within your organisation. Put aside time to review progress, any new information that has come to light and the next steps.

3 Learn to Listen, Listen To Learn

Listen to what your customers have to say about your service, how their industry is changing, and the issues they face. Then you will be able to put forward a proposition that will meet their needs and give you a good chance of winning their business in the future.

Above all show an interest in them and their business. Approach them in the right way you’ll find they are only too willing to talk about their company and what they are doing.

4 Test the Temperature

If you have had personal contact with the customer in the last 3 months, they will be warm and you can treat them as such. Over 12 months and in all likelihood they will have forgotten you; they are freezing cold. With these customers, you will need to rebuild the relationship. Consequently your form of approach and messages will be different from those you apply to the warm contacts.

The advantage of implementing a relationship marketing programme is that all your customers will stay warm and you will not have to constantly rebuild relationships from scratch, saving time and money.

5 Cross Sell

Treat your major customers as partners. Consult them as to what new services and products would help them to achieve their business goals.

Identify which of your other products and services your customers needs. They will be buying them from someone, why not you? Do they know you can supply them?

6 Exploit Your Existing Customers

Identify other buyers for your services in the organisation. A client of ours selling to Universities and large companies was missing big opportunities because they only had contacts with certain parts of these organisations. By identifying individuals in other departments and implementing a relationship-building communication plan, prospective new business from the same organisations was increased by some 300%.

7 Why Did They Stop Buying?

Make sure you track the buying patterns and frequency of purchase. Contact customers who have stopped buying i.e. break this pattern, to find out why. It may be inertia, a new competitor or some dissatisfaction with your product or service that you can take action to rectify.

8 Communicate, Communicate and Communicate Again

Create a Relationship Marketing programme by exploring all of the ways to keep in contact. All have their place and normally a mix of them, including e-mails, newsletters, e-bulletins, mail, telephone and seminars will prove the most productive.

9 Be Creative

Seek out opportunities to talk to and meet customers. A client of ours sells to companies where legislation plays an important role in their businesses. New legislation was about to be introduced. By undertaking research with their existing and potential customers, I discovered they would welcome a seminar providing information on this legislation and advice on how it would affect their operations. This was a great opportunity for our clients to be perceived as the experts in their field and most importantly gave them the opportunity to meet existing customers and prospects on a one to one basis

10 Keeping Track

To maximise the use of your time and resources, it is essential that activity is tracked and acted upon. If you have a small number of customers a spreadsheet programme such as Excel can be used. The disadvantage is that it will not help you with planning. Systems like Goldmine and ACT can not only handle large amounts of data, but also aid planning with actions/tasks and reminder functions. If you already have such a system are you making full use of it?