Existing Customers are Your Best Future Customers

How much business is waiting for you in your customer files? Do you know how to get it? Or will you allow someone else to circumvent your relationship and take business that should have been yours away from you without even realizing it’s happening? Closing the sale is just the first step. After the sale your customer referral system should provide the needed contact to allow you to mine deeper for more business.

There’s no cold calling involved here. These people are already customers so they will take your call and they will talk to you. Develop a plan to contact a specific number of existing customers each month over and above the appointments you’re scheduling to secure new customers. There are lots of ways you can use automated systems to provide contact that builds value and your relationship, but at certain points you need to actually schedule a real contact. And I don’t mean inviting them to have an insurance or financial review. Even to your existing customers that equals sales call, and they will balk.

Don’t reach out unprepared. Target specific customers to contact, but don’t target them because you have a specific product you want to sell them. Rather target them because they’re one of your ideal customers. Before you call them make sure you have reviewed their files so you know as much about them as you can. If the person you’re contacting is a business person do your homework and find out as much about their business as you can. This is a pretty easy task as most businesses have a website these days that tells a lot of information about the business. Then make your call and let them know you appreciate their business and would like to get together with them. Perhaps you could invite them to coffee, lunch, breakfast or to an event you know they’d enjoy attending.

Even though this person is already a customer you still need to establish rapport. So, you want to put the person at ease and have an enjoyable conversation. A quick way to annoy a business owner is to ask them questions about their business that anyone could know. Instead you might ask them how they came to be in the business, or a question that expands on the information you were able to find. People enjoy talking about themselves so this is pretty easy.

Your meeting to learn more about them and strengthen your relationship. You aren’t meeting to sell them a product, but you are meeting to learn about areas of possible concerns that they have. When they bring something up that you have a solution for, don’t pounce on them and start to tell them all about this great product you have. Instead keep them talking because you might discover something even more important as you continue the conversation. Find out what areas of concern are important enough to them that they’d really like to make them go away. Clarify what you’ve heard and let them know that you may have a way to make this concern go away for them. Then schedule a follow-up appointment to share the solution you have with them.

What if you don’t discover any areas of concern? So what, you’ve deepened the relationship. You’ve verified you’re a quality person and someone they wouldn’t mind referring to others. At the end of the meeting as you get ready to leave you can also let them know a very specific person or type of person you’d like to meet and ask if they have a connection with that person. Never use vague questions like, “you know my business is built on referrals who do you know that needs my services”? Those rarely work. But if you asked how you could get introduced to the owner of XYZ company because you have some valuable information you’d like to share with them you’re much more likely to get an introduction.

Are You Building a Legacy?

Every day you work with clients who are concerned about building a legacy. A legacy is what you pass on to the next generation. What will you be able to pass on as a result of your business? Do you even want to build a legacy business, or are you only concerned about building a lifestyle business? That is a very important question that impacts your daily decisions.

A lifestyle business is a business that supports the lifestyle you want. So if you’re only concerned with building a lifestyle business your main concern is generating enough revenue to meet your financial needs. No small undertaking in and of itself. Quite often those entering the business have grand visions about the lifestyle they will be able to live once they’ve made it. Usually when you’re making those mental projections you’re looking at the top 3% of those in the industry, and discounting the actual earnings of the average producer. There isn’t anything wrong with that. It just means that you have to take the required actions to be a top producer yourself rather than an average producer.

When you plan a lifestyle business you aren’t planning for a transferable or salable business. Now some of you are captive and have preset conditions for exiting the business. Just like any business owner when you get ready to leave the business you have choices. You could work until retirement and simply close the doors. In which case, an ongoing income from the business will not be part of your plan to fulfill your financial needs for retirement. You could actively work the business until a certain point in time when, having prepared others to take on your daily responsibilities, you can take on a purely leadership role and continue to draw a direct income from the business for running the business. Whatever you plan you just need to take the appropriate actions long before you get to that time so you have everything in place to provide what you intend.

If you intend to build a legacy, what will that mean for you? Does it mean providing a financial gift to the people and causes that are important to you? Does it mean building a business that is transferable or salable? If you want to transfer your business have you developed the people who will fill your shoes someday to take on the roles you’ll be giving up? When it comes to selling a business did you know that all businesses are marketable but most aren’t salable? The majority of the businesses that are put on the market today will never sell, or they will sell for far less than the owner envisioned? This can be especially true for service businesses because your biggest asset is your client base. Your client base won’t provide enough salable value if the business depends on you to succeed. Because once you aren’t active in the business your clients will start defecting leaving any potential buyer with very little value.

Lifestyle or legacy, there isn’t one right choice. There is only the choice that is right for you. As we enter the last quarter of the year now is the time you and other business owners begin to think about their strategic plans for the upcoming year. Thinking about the kind of business you want to build, how will that choice impact your resource allocations or resource needs? How will it impact your people? And are you taking the actions you need to take now to develop the people who will provide for the lifestyle and/or legacy you envision?

You're Only as Successful as the Sum of Your Parts

You’re only as healthy as the health of each organ and system in your body. And your business can only be as successful as the weakest element required to run a business. At its most basic level your business consists of just three functionalities: marketing, sales, and production/administration. But to make each piece perform at a peak level it requires: strategic planning, marketing, sales, time management, and leadership. Just like the bottleneck in a production process limits the process, the weakest piece in your business will limit your success. Your strategic plan provides the overall picture and actionable and measurable plan to run the entire business.

Marketing is the engine that drives the need for the other functionalities. Without marketing you don’t have a way to connect with the people you want to work with. Without a way to make a good connection it’s very hard to fill your appointment book. When you don’t have appointments you can’t have sales and without sales there isn’t a need for production/administration.

Without sales there isn’t a business. The more productive and efficient you become in sales the higher your potential, and the greater success you can achieve. Sales is an emotional process and experience for both you and your prospects. When you aren’t getting the sales you need it’s emotionally devastating to you and for you. If you can’t help your prospects to get to the underlying emotional reason they want something you’ll never become a top producer.

As your marketing produces the leads you need to fill your appointment book and you close business, time and time efficiency grow increasingly important. Time management can be the single thing that will either make you or break you. If you don’t have balance in your life the strain and imbalance will lead to increasing levels of stress and the more stressed you are the greater the pain will be from time management issues. You have to increase your time efficiency so you have the time to lead the life you want to live, or it just won’t be worth it.

Whether you work alone or you have a staff someone has to be the leader and that someone is you. Leadership is the skill you need to get results through yourself and others. Leadership is the skill you need to develop the strategy for your business, and leadership is what will motivate you to take the actions you need to take even when you don’t want to take them to get the results you want. Leadership is also the skill you need to improve your communications between yourself and your clients, and yourself and your staff. No one is ever fully developed in all areas so you always have opportunities for improvement, but when you lack proficiency in any of these areas that area can be the limiting bottleneck that keeps you where you are and makes it nearly impossible for you to move forward.

You have an Office, You Work from Your Car, & You Work from Home

You work from all these places and spaces. How well are they functioning for you or how well are you functioning in them? It’s hard enough getting one space to function let alone three different yet very necessary work environments. It probably seems like whatever you need is in one of the spaces where you’re not.

Identify the functions that you need to perform in each space. Physically make a list of these functions for each separate work space. Star the functions that you need to perform in more than one space. Give each work space a number and add that number behind the starred functions. In all likelihood many if not most of the functions you need to perform need to be performed from either your home office or your real office with the same level of ease.

Set your home and office work spaces up identically. That simple step alone prevents you from wasting time trying to figure out where you may have stored something that you now need. As you set up each space use a stack basket or folder or some common place where you will put the items you need to take with you to the other work space. Before you leave one work space always check your stack basket to see what needs to go with you.

Your car is your portable office. You need a brief case or some kind of professional bag that goes with you where ever you go. This portable office needs to be stocked with the items from your stack basket that need to be transferred to the other work space, any folders and information you’ll need for your appointments for the day, small sized office supplies, and something you can work on when you have unexpected delays or cancellations. Even if the something you take to work on is just something to catch up on your professional reading that’s ok because you won’t have wasted the available time caused by the delay. Your appointment calendar and To Do list should always be in your portable office that goes with you because you never know when you’ll need to schedule or reschedule an appointment, or when an action idea will come to you that needs to go on your To Do list.

You probably don’t want to have duplicate client folders, so one space will hold any paper folders that you require for clients. At the end of the work day or before your workday starts, whichever works best for you, identify the client folders you’ll need throughout the day so you can have them with you when you need them. Of course, if your information is predominantly stored electronically and you have a lap top that can access your information from any location this is a lot less critical, in that case just plan for any documents or documentation that you’ll need throughout the day. Sometimes you or others will think it would save space if you shared your work space with someone else. This really isn’t a good idea. As respectful as you or the other person(s) may be things tend to get moved or removed and you waste a lot of valuable time. Wherever your workspace is it doesn’t have to be fancy, but it does need to be organized for efficiency. You want the things you need often in ready reach and the things you don’t put away and out of sight. Developing a system to efficiently manage your work spaces will help you to work more efficiently and reduce unnecessary stress.