If the easiest customer to sell is an existing customer, what is the second easiest customer to sell to?

Well the answer is a referral. Unfortunately most businesses live with the myth that, if they treat their customers well and give them great service, these customers will refer their friends to them.

Wrong!

The lack of a referral program is a huge marketing mistake.

The last thing that anyone is thinking about when they leave your office or store is, “Whom can I send to these nice people so that they can buy from them?”

It's not because they don't want to. It's because we're all too busy to be thinking about it.

That's why you need to have a customer rewards referral system in place which will give your customers an incentive to refer – while they're still in your office or store.

If a referral customer is the second easiest customer to sell, then who do you think is the third easiest customer to sell?

The answer is lost customers.

Again most businesses totally ignore the customers that have not been using their services for several years, when in fact these people are infinitely easier to sell than new customers.

What could you do today to reactivate old customers?

Too infrequent contact with present customers

So referrals and lost customers are the second and third easiest customers to sell to but, if you haven't already guessed, your present customers are the easiest.

The best way to accomplish this is to simply increase the frequency of your contacts with them.

It is amazing to me how many businesses think they can mail or call the customer too frequently.

You can but you're probably not even close. According to one survey, the proper frequency to contact your customers is every 20 days.

Perhaps even worse, for every month that you do not contact your customers, you lose relationship with 10% of them.

So wait 10 months and you might as well be mailing to the phone book.

One of the fastest ways to get an upturn in your business is to increase the rate of contact with the current customer base.

There's magic in increased frequency.

What could you do today to increase contact with present customers?

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This is an excerpt from my book, “9 Rules For Business Prosperity in the New Economy”.  The book may be purchased in both printed and Kindle editions at: http://arizonamarketingassociation.org/9-rules-business-prosperity/