Losing clients? Stem the flow

Imagine a nice shiny bucket, steadily filling up with new clients you have been working really hard to attract through a variety of marketing activities. Your goal is to build long term – profitable – client relationships with them. With more clients your growth goals are looking good.

This bucket is every business’ dream.

The reality, however, is that often once those prospects have become clients, they don’t get the same level of attention as prospects. After all it’s really quite exciting to chase that sale and ‘land’ a new client!

As a result, your bucket of clients starts to develop some holes, with clients slowly but steadily leaving you.

There could be several reasons why they might leave, however you mustn’t give them any reason to leave – especially when you consider it costs between 7-15 times more to win a new client than it does to retain an existing client.  

So What Can be Done to Plug the Holes?

•      Measure what business is being lost – the more profitable the business being lost, the sooner you need to stop it leaving

•      What types of clients are being lost – is there a common type of customer that would help to identify what is turning them off?

•      Can you identify the reason why business is being lost? This could include:

-        Bad customer service

-        Missed delivery dates

-        Not keeping in touch with existing customers, which makes them feel ignored and worthless.

-        Products out of stock – lead time doesn’t suit customers / products not available in the customers’ ideal location

-        Payment terms not acceptable to customers / no options for different payment methods & payment terms e.g. monthly instalments vs all up front.

-        Cheaper Competitors

And there are probably others specific to your business. If you can’t easily identify why a certain client left you, call them and ask. And be grateful for the feedback, so you don’t repeat the situation.

•      Analyse your results. What action needs to be taken to address these leaks? Often the action can be implemented immediately to start reducing the amount of business being lost.

•      And it’s important to take this corrective action BEFORE you spend any more money on marketing to attract new customers!

If you need any help understanding why clients are leaving your business and you’re serious about building your business and keeping clients, give us a call on 01296 737823 or visit our website (www.enterprisemarketing.co.uk) to see how we can help.

What will GDPR Mean for your Marketing?

The EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) will become law in the UK on 25th May 2018. This legislation lays down the rules regarding personal data, how you collect it, what you can do with it, and when you may not use it.

The effects of the regulation will be far reaching, and the penalties for non-compliance simply draconian, with fines up to €20,000,000 or 4% of global turnover, whichever is the greater.

A fundamental principle behind GDPR is that “personal data can only be gathered legally, under strict conditions, for a legitimate purpose.”

This has ramifications for how you collect, store and use data about your prospects, clients and staff.

What is Personal Data?

Personal data is anything that can be identified as belonging to a specific individual. This includes name, email address, notes about meetings with that person, details of their spouse and children and any other information you choose to hold about them.

There is also a second level of personal data known as sensitive data. This includes religion, sexual orientation, medical history and similar information.

Collecting Data

Before storing any data about anyone you must ensure you have their express permission to hold and use that data. Even when you’re networking and someone has given you their business card, you cannot just add them to your marketing database without an audit trail to prove they have given you their permission.

Where you have an online sign up form, you must enforce a double opt-in process where an individual gives you their details and your automated system sends them an email to click through to confirm they want to be on your list. The automated system will then be the audit trail to prove consent was given.

GDPR also states that the reason for collecting the data must be clear so that your visitors can give ‘informed consent’ knowing what the data will be used for.

When you send out marketing emails there must be an opt-out option on every single email. This is good practice and you should be doing it already. And that opt-out process must work! I have clicked on opt-out links only to be taken to a ‘404 page not found’ page. Following GDPR this will be considered to be a breach of the regulation.

Right to be Forgotten

While your opt-out clause allows your recipients to opt-out of receiving your marketing emails, the right to be forgotten is more than that. GDPR states that any individual can ask to be ‘forgotten’ by your systems and your company, and you must comply. This means deleting all personal data where that data is a) no longer necessary, or b) the person withdraws consent to processing and there is no legitimate ground for processing. Legitimate grounds could be where someone owes you money and you need to retain their information to follow up and get paid.

Of course, once someone has been ‘forgotten’ by your systems, you will no longer have the information to not target them. This could mean you accidentally target them as a potential new customer in the future. At present, it is not clear whether suppressing the data will be acceptable rather than deletion.

What do YOU Need to do to Prepare for GDPR?

Review your existing data. Where has it come from? Do you have express permission to contact these people? Is the data still up-to-date and valid? And do you have an audit trail to prove you have permission? If you cannot demonstrate that consent has been positively given then you may be open to fines.

Get consent. If your existing data won’t pass the GDPR conditions then consider contacting everyone on your database before 25th May 2018 and ask them to positively confirm their consent. According to the Information Commissioner’s Office “consent cannot be inferred from silence, pre-ticked boxes or inactivity.”

Set up systems for future data collection to ensure explicit consent is given and recorded. Don’t rely on verbal agreement, always put something in writing to the relevant party with the option to opt-out.

How We Can Help

If you have a database of personal data that you haven’t used for a while then it will need data cleansing. We can do this for you, either a simple cleanse to ensure you have the correct address and phone number, and the business is still trading; or a full telemarketing cleanse where we will call everyone on the list to ensure you also have the right contact person at that business.

Call us today on 01296 737823 or visit our website (www.enterprisemarketing.co.uk) for more information.

What’s Your Business Capacity? (and why you need to know)

Knowing your business capacity helps you plan your workload and your marketing activity. That, in turn, will help relieve the small business feast and famine roller coaster of too much work one month and too little the following month.

Do you know what your business capacity is? And what to do about it if you’re not at capacity?

According to Investopedia.com, ‘capacity’ is the maximum level of output that a company can sustain to make a product or provide a service. As an example, a car manufacturing plant could have a capacity of 1000 cars a month. This capacity would not be running the machines at full speed all day, every day. To make a meaningful capacity calculation you need to take account of machine maintenance time, and possible retooling/recalibration time in an industrial setting. You also need to consider the human resources that are needed and allow for sickness and holidays. Capacity is how much work you can get done in a specific time period, with the resources you have available.

With service industries, it is more difficult to determine your capacity as there are no physical quantities to be counted. However, you can get an idea of your capacity through experience. Can you handle 5 client projects a month, or 15 client projects a month? You’ll know how much time an ‘average’ client takes to service and you can estimate how many hours of productive time you have each week or month.

There are overheads in any business; admin tasks that need doing, marketing your business, social media relationship building, prospecting for new clients, and spending time in meetings to land new customers. All these tasks eat in to the time available to do the work and must be considered when calculating your capacity. You also need to take account of the ‘idle’ time when your staff are chatting amongst themselves, catching up after the weekend, going to the bathroom and making cups of tea.

How many productive hours are available each week or each month? And how many ‘average’ client projects will fit into that amount of time? This will give you a rough idea of your business capacity.

Once you have that figure, you will know whether you are working at, or below, capacity. Are your staff finding ‘busy’ work to do because there is not enough client work? Or are you overloaded and trying to run above capacity?

Trying to do too much in too little time is very stressful for everyone. It tends to lead to errors and mistakes which then need correcting. The correcting takes even more time and overloads your capacity even further.

Both under and over capacity situations need to be addressed to ensure your staff are happy and productive, and your business profitable.

What can be done?

If you’re constantly working below capacity, you need to look at your marketing and new business development processes. You need to bring in more business to increase the workload to ‘comfortably busy’.

If you’re working over capacity then you need to consider whether you need to increase staffing levels, or possibly outsource some of your work if that’s possible.

Every situation is different.

And even if you are comfortably working at capacity, are you working with your ideal clients?

There are many different reasons why clients might be less than ideal, and this will be unique to you and your business. Some people work well with detail-oriented clients who want to check every dot and comma, others prefer clients who virtually abdicate responsibility for the end result, and leave it up to you. When you are servicing clients who are less than ideal, they take longer than average to service and cause additional stress to your staff.

If you are working with less than ideal clients, you may want to consider finding more ideal clients and finishing your relationships with those who cause stress and disruption.

Ultimately, you are looking for a happy, productive working environment where everyone is comfortably busy.

What next?

Let us help you.

If you’re running over capacity, we may be able to take on some of your surplus marketing-specific work. If you are working below capacity, we can assist with your marketing to bring in new customers. We can do market research to help you identify your ideal clients and find more of the same.

Visit our website (www.enterprisemarketing.co.uk) or call us today on 01296 737823, to find out more.