Adrian is currently away on a holiday adventure so we thought you’d enjoy a dip into the archives to re-visit some posts that you may not have seen. Enjoy.

Originally posted on November 30th, 2009

When trying to engineer new growth, many businesses fall into the trap of just trying to buy new customers. However, there’s an easier way of increasing your sales than courting new customers. It’s generating more sales from your existing customers. Rather than going down the path of generating new relationships why not try and develop the relationships you have already built up with existing or past customers. They already know you and they like what you do for them.

For example, a client that we work with (they make custom made wood products) recently was struggling to come up with ways to generate new business from existing clients. They were even hesitant about just calling up clients to keep in touch. As a result, we came up with an idea that they offer a free service or healthcheck for the work they had done for their existing clients. This was something that they were comfortable with. Keen to get going, they started making calls and their first call generated a time to go round and visit one of their clients and deliver their service. The client was delighted with the service and scheduled £20,000 of new work. Not bad for a bit of brainstorming and one phone call! The lesson here is, what can you provide to your clients that has limited incremental cost to your business but offers high perceived value to your clients? Sometimes, you have to give before you can receive.

Another example, a friend of mine bought a new bike recently. He’s a keen cyclist and it was expensive. However, after the purchase, my friend never heard from the shop again. Now, how much effort would it have taken for that shop to collect my friend’s contact details, put them on the mailing list, make a note to call them in 6 weeks to schedule them in for their ‘free’ tune up services and then to follow up with them on any other items of ‘kit’ that they mentioned or expressed an interest in when in the shop? How much more could my friend be worth to that cycling shop?

Thanks to cheetah100 for the image