Ways to Maintain Your Clients During an Economic Downturn
by Wayne Brown
The economic downturn has forced CEOs and founders to reevaluate the strategy for growth in business expansion. However, for the entrepreneur, the current economic forecast can cause additional stress both personally and professionally. Your business and opportunities can evaporate overnight. Some companies will need to pivot in order to remain relevant. Despite this, maintaining customers in midst of both economic and social changes can be challenging.
The cost of doing business, whether it is to outsource your solution or manage internally, continues to escalate in times of uncertainty. Many small business owners are not fully aware of the cost to acquire and onboard a new client. However, knowing the costs of new customer acquisition can have an impact on the sustainability of the business. Acquiring new clients is hard work, but when your client’s decide to move their business elsewhere, knowing the reasons why they choose to defect is important. This intelligence can be used to retain other clients or to refine your customer strategy.
In this time of change, CEOs must continue to engage with their customers. They need to be assured if their current business relationship will change, and if so, what will be the impact on their current business and revenue. Clients are undergoing stress so the business owner needs to know if their company will be sustainable or not. Communication with your customers builds this relationship and becomes a good practice despite the current economic situation.
For a business to expand and grow there is a need to reduce defection and understand the ways to retain your clients. Having successfully executed a marketing strategy for a number of FinTech companies, it is important to have an understanding of your client business strategies and goals. Building a basic program to monitor and evaluate your client portfolio can go a long way to reaching profitability. Here are a few basic questions to consider:
- What progress are you making to connect with your customer?
- Is there an opportunity to tweak your current strategy or focus on a particular product feature?
- Is your current product still relevant or will demand decrease?
- When the feedback is less than positive, is there an action plan that is developed and communicated and agreed to by the client?
- Have you obtained competitor intelligence data and how is this data being used
- What does evaluating both the long and short term vision reveal?
- Is there a need to focus more on digital solutions/ecommerce as customers begin to migrate more to these solutions?
- How do you respond to requests to make changes to your client solutions?
The responses to these questions can provide you with the information needed to gain additional customer value. Holding regular client meetings with an agenda to cover the outstanding issues is important to build a stronger relationship. Customers continue to test the market and may regularly “flirt” with the competition.
Developing a plan to ensure you are doing everything you can to retain your clients is worth all the effort. Working to obtain new business when other clients are defecting is the not the recipe for a successful business outcome. However, ignoring your customers will accelerate defection creating a hardship for the growth of the business.
The Walker Group is a marketing and business development company serving multiple industries including FinTech, banking and technology. Our varied market segments enables us to identify synergies and opportunities to stimulate growth as we partner with our clients to build their business. Through our one-on-one CEO Advisory Services we have helped companies to navigate through their key business problems, increase sales, build new revenue streams, market their product and gain new customers. Join us for a series of webinars in the Spring of 2020.
For more information contact Wayne Brown at wbrown@walkergroupnyc.com.
