I’ve got a question.
Why in the world would you possibly want to go to the outside market and spend a lot of time, effort and money trying to attract, generate, convert and establish new customers or clients… until you have first focused a fraction of the effort, a tiny fraction of the time, and a millimeter of the expense trying to preserve and regenerate old, inactive customers?
Instead, turn your attention to those customers, clients or patients whose patronage you once enjoyed but who, for one reason or another, have stopped doing business with you.
Attrition Happens for Three Relatively Simple Reasons
There is a term in business called “attrition.”
Attrition is a term that refers to the percentage or level of former customers who cease purchasing.
They become inactive. see this all the time.
Most people don’t realize it, but most attrition in most types of businesses occurs for relatively simple reasons.
They just went away.
They had something happen — they got sick, they had to travel, they didn’t have time, or something else occurred that stopped them temporarily.
And they had every intention of getting back in the fold and reconnecting with you or your business.
They just haven’t.
You Have an Obligation to Show How Much You Care
So if you or your product, service or people inadvertently, accidentally did anything to offend, dissatisfy, or under-perform on your promise to a customer or client, and that client was so negatively impacted that he or she stopped transacting business with you — you have an obligation.
You have a responsibility.
You have an opportunity of the highest magnitude to communicate with them… to get them back… to do the right thing… to make it right… to extend yourself and demonstrate just how much better and more qualitative an organization yours really is, how much more you care, and how much more important they really are.
Even though you’re not making a dime from them, they may think that if you commit and resign yourself that if somebody never came back to you again, you’re going to do everything in your power to make sure you right any wrong, and that you structure your arrangement and your relationship with them so that the last transaction they ever have with you will be satisfying, profitable and a very positive one — even if they never come back.
I know you will regenerate lost customers and clients in droves.
What follows are a few wonderful examples of exactly how that’s best done.
Look at your business.
Do you have even a clue how many customers no longer transact with you?
Have you ever looked at that as a percentage, so you could analyze what it really means?
There are companies and industries that lose as much as 75% of their customers every year.
Can you imagine the difference and the impact it would, could, and should make — if you could only reduce that loss by 10% or 15%?
Cutting your attrition by 20% is just like adding 20% to your bottom line.
Why go outside if you don’t first maximize what’s inside?
Listen carefully to my advice.
This is probably one of the easiest, most immediate, most overlooked, and truly important areas of tactical business conduct for you to really focus on.
Every business, unless you’re really unique — and you could be — has attrition.
Attrition, again, is nothing more than the customers who either move, stop buying, get perturbed because they had a bad experience, they didn’t meet on time, don’t come back or buy, had a problem they didn’t get resolved, went to an alternative supplier, went to a different product or service type generically.
What happened?
If you look over your customer list (presuming you have a customer list and you’ve maintained it for a long duration of time) you will see that you probably, through attrition, have lost a not-inconsequential amount of customers.
And in any kind of a business, losing many customers is consequential.
Over the past 16 years I've worked with Entrepreneurs, Solopreneurs, Start-ups, National, International & Mulit-national business helping them systematically and continually grow revenue and…
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