How to Grow Your Business the Hard Way

It takes far more time, effort and money to win new business from a new customer than it does to win repeat business from a current customer. That being the case, why do some businesses focus almost all their efforts on the former and very little on the latter?

How much time and effort do you spend on attracting and converting new customers versus keeping your best customers happy and loyal?

We live in a highly competitive world where standing out from the crowd can be so tough. But hopefully you can stand out and offer a service or experience that your competitors can’t.

And if you can, hopefully you’ve got your communication channels right so that your ideal prospects see you.

And if you have, hopefully you’ve got your value propositions right – the messages that will resonate with your ideal prospects better than your competitors – that will bring that service or experience to their attention.

And if you’ve got all of that right, hopefully you have a way to smoothly transition the prospect into a customer.

Having fought hard to win a customer, you would think a business would do all it can to provide a quality product, service or experience because a happy customer is a loyal customer.

Instead, we’ve all experienced someone who will deliver just enough but no more or who make you feel like you’re a pain and an inconvenience or who will talk over you and tell you how its going to be because they’re the expert or who cares little whether you’re satisfied or not.

And yet these are the people who spend money advertising in the local press and online, competing with others and asking for your business.

Of course, a loyal customer is the best customer – no more fighting for their attention and convincing them that you can meet their needs – they know what you can offer and if they need that service again they are far more likely to come back to you than risk a bad experience with an unknown provider.

Building a loyal customer-base is vital. Service businesses like hotels, restaurants and dry-cleaners and product companies like mobile and broadband providers and car manufacturers have to fight so hard to win your custom first time round that to turn you into a fan and a repeat customer is their dream.

So once they have you, you’d think they would do all they can to give you the experience they said they would. And of course, the most successful companies do.

But how many times have you gone back to a restaurant whose food you had to send back or whose service was poor? How many times have you gone back to the dry-cleaner who damaged your clothing and seemed to care little? Hopefully never.

For high-volume product manufacturers, it only takes one unreliable or badly designed product or terrible after sales service to damage a company’s reputation and sales for years.

My wife and I stayed in a hotel for a couple of nights at the weekend. This hotel would have had to compete with many other hotels in the region on many hotel-booking websites. It would also have had to grab the attention of my wife who is pretty choosy and will take the time to find the right one.

Without going into detail, it was a really disappointing experience and not surprisingly we won’t go back.

A business that provides a bad experience not only loses that customer, but it loses any potential custom that may have come from that person’s recommendations. And in this age of the Internet and transparency, it could lose custom through poor online reviews.

Businesses like these spend so much time, effort and money competing with others to win business and they fail to appreciate that they are in fact their own biggest competitors.

Before you get hung up about what your competitors are offering, look at what you are offering and make sure you deliver the experience you promise. Get that right, eliminate your biggest competitor – you – and then care about the rest.

Of course, at some point you will have a customer whose demands are unreasonable and who won’t be happy no matter what you do. But provided you know you deliver a great product or service, these encounters will be rare. (And if they do come back to you, turn the situation around and take great pleasure in turning down their business.)

To identify areas that need to work better and to get the whole working as well as it can, start by mapping out how your business flows through its major cause-and-effect stages.

Assess the efficiency and effectiveness of each stage and its connection to its neighbours. Find the bottlenecks, the mistakes and the weak links and address them.

Get the key systems and processes for each stage of your business working and your business will flow smoothly and efficiently, you will be able to deliver on your promises, build a base of happy customers and spend more time and effort on keeping them than on finding new ones.

Establishing this business flow is actually 1 of 4 types of strength a business needs. Download my free report How Strong Is Your Business to learn how to establish it and the other 3.

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