Chapter 15
UNLOCKING THE HIDDEN POWER OF YOUR CUSTOMERS
When it comes to developing relationships with customers, it is important to take a long-term rather than short-term perspective. While individual customers might seem “small” now, they may be approaching a growth period, due to their place in their customer life cycle or a change in status (e.g., marriage, children, job promotion, retirement). A business customer today could acquire (or be acquired by) another company tomorrow, thereby growing exponentially and becoming a much more valuable customer of your company. When I was with the Peppers & Rogers Group, we spent a lot of time advising clients how to measure the value of their existing customer base, as well as designing action plans for each customer value segment.1
The ability to increase the value of your existing customers is a critical success factor in growing your business; this ability will be instrumental to ending the cycle of having to acquire yet another new customer to replace one that slipped out the back.
Ask yourself these questions as you think about how well you and your colleagues are nurturing your customer base to grow your revenues:
- Are we focused on growing our business organically through increasing share of wallet with each customer? Expanding business with existing customers is often the easiest way to grow.
- Are we doing the simple things, such as thanking our existing customers for their continued business—without trying to sell them something? ...
