‘Client hunting’ seems to be a big burden for many modern businesses. As attracting and reaching out to potential clients, or prospects, becomes an increasingly difficult and complicated task, you might think you need to hire new marketing experts and salespeople to acquire new clients for you to keep your business afloat and profitable.
However, in the twenty-first century, consumers are looking for a ‘relationship first’ service from businesses and want to feel good from buying from their favourite shops and sites. Creating this connection with your customers and clients is fundamental to retaining old clients and keeping a strong, reliable base of profit before going after more, bigger clients.
Benefits of retaining old clients
Less time-consuming – Doing business with people you’ve worked within the past is magnitudes easier and quicker than reaching out to prospects and persuading potential customers and clients to buy from you.
Better chance of referral – Providing absolutely excellent, extremely high standards to your current clients and customers is almost a guaranteed way to bring in new customers through referrals. You can build powerful rapport with people you already know, encouraging them to come back time and time again, and a lot of trust which leads to regular referrals as satisfied clients tell coworkers and friends about your service/offering and increase your prospect reach.
Reliable – New clients and prospects can be extremely unreliable. Working with someone you’re only just getting to know can make your normal process difficult and risky. Clients can ghost you, or just be downright a pain to work with. Especially when you are not protected by a parent party, working with new people can be daunting and is usually not the near perfect, smooth process you enjoy with your regular, ‘old but gold’ clients. Retaining old clients provides a reliable, strong base profit which you can improve on with ‘client hunting’. The disadvantages of neglecting your old clients are multiduous, as finding new ones takes significantly more time, effort and resources than retaining your old ones, and dissatisfied old clients can leave highly damaging negative words about your business if they feel that you spend too much time chasing new people and neglect them.
Focus on quality – Constantly chasing new clients constitutes a fundamental change in your company’s work policy. If you neglect your old clients and depend mostly on the income received from working with new clients and customers, your company is essentially recklessly chasing profit while abandoning a strong, positive work ethic. This can be damaging and the wreckage left from leaving old clients not fully satisfied can linger for a long time. However, continuing to dedicate yourself to your regular clients and deliver that common high standard ensures your business has a strong grounding in good relationships and service. Therefore, focusing on your old clients in turn encourages greater focus towards establishing yourself in the industry as a reliable and respectable service provider who can get jobs and offerings done repeatedly, without seeming too busy or unfriendly, or too dependent on excessive marketing.
