For many businesses, particularly those providing services, more than 85% of business comes from personal referrals and recommendations. Yet many businesses spend thousands of hours, and dollars, trying to acquire new customers, and relatively little time and effort nurturing and retaining their existing ones.

Valuing and retaining your current clients and customers is essential. Not only will you benefit from their continued custom directly, you are also more likely to benefit from any new clients or customers they recommend. And given that it’s 6-7 times more expensive to gain one new client or customer than it is to retain one, retaining your existing clients and customers, and being highly recommendable, can have a huge positive impact on your profitability.

Clients and customers who already trust and respect you:

• are more likely to acknowledge, and value, what you provide and the benefits they gain from dealing with you
• may be more willing to accept your prices, terms and conditions without question or negotiation
• are often more loyal
• require less ’selling to’ and
• are more likely to continue doing business with you, and even increase the amount they spend, as their trust in you increases.

They are also significantly more likely to recommend you to people they know and trust giving you an opportunity to gain new clients whilst reducing your acquisition costs and improving your profitability. Read the rest of this entry »

Should you ‘reduce, reuse and recycle’?  From a reputation perspective, if not an eco-perspective, the answer, in my opinion, is yes.

You might think people may have had enough of whatever it is you provide, but what’s more important is not that that they’ve tried, or heard, it before, but that it remains relevant to them.

For us as service providers, too, the temptation to develop or provide ‘new’ stuff can be extremely tempting. We think clients and customers may tire of our offerings and want something that’s ‘new’ and ‘improved’.

And we may grow tired ourselves of offering the same things day in and day out. However, clients don’t necessarily want ‘new’ stuff. What they want is relevant stuff.

As a product or service provider, your job is to remind your clients and customers just how relevant whatever it is you provide continues to be them. The core of your key messages probably won’t change. Nor will the benefits, or uses, of whatever you provide. What will change is how you frame your offering to make it relevant to them right now.

So if you’re trying to think up ‘new’ ways of doing things, think too about how you can re-frame, re-package and re-communicate what you already provide so that it remains relevant and valuable to your clients and customers. It’s a reputation-winning strategy.

Whatever you offer may need tweaking, but it probably won’t need abandoning altogether.

Think creatively and remind yourself, and your clients, of what’s great about your offering by linking it to current trends and positioning it as a ‘must have now’. After all, an anagram of ‘Relevance Rules’ is ‘Revenues Recall’.

New Year resolutions happen every year, but predictions generally only occur at the turn of a decade. Knowing what might happen before it actually occurs would certainly be handy.

If we could predict what might happen it would certainly give us a competitive edge.  We could be ‘one-step-ahead-of-the-game’, give us an opportunity to maximise every opportunity and put all our efforts into those things likely to generate the greatest reward – whatever we might want that to be.

Moving from the ‘noughties’ to the teen years of the 21st Century  gives us a opportunity, not only to look back on what happend between 2000 and 2009 – think iTunes, the social media explosion and wireless internet – but also to look ahead and predict what might happen during 2010 and beyond. Read the rest of this entry »

When things go wrong, the importance on focusing on the overall experience, rather than just the problem, is beautifully highlighted in Sean D’Souza’s New Zealand Herald article ‘Fix the experience – not just the fish’.

Often, when a service provider is challenged for a failing in some way, they focus purely on fixing the problem. Whilst this is hugely important, it’s only one part of a two-part process that will create client or customer satisfaction. Read the rest of this entry »

If you’ve never stopped to consider what people think of you, or your company, in a word, I strongly recommend you do. Why? Because it’s an ‘acid-test’ of reputation.

Many of us grow up thinking it’s up to us to create our own reputation; that we can control our reputation entirely. However, thinking we can control our reputation is a myth. The reality is we can’t.

We can’t control our reputation because we cannot control what other people think of us. And what people think of us, ‘in a word’ or two, is our reputation. Read the rest of this entry »

If you’ve ever been irritated, or frustrated, by someone using words and phrases that make things harder to understand, rather than easier, you’re not alone.

Research shows more than 40 percent of New Zealanders don’t have reading, writing, speaking and listening skills necessary to understand many written documents used in workplaces. Yet, many of us continue to use words that confuse when we write and speak, losing both goodwill, and possible business, in the process.

You might feel comfortable using the words ‘pro’ and ‘anti’ instead of ‘for’ and ‘against’, but are you sure the person you’re communicating with is as familiar and comfortable with them as you?

Or how about ‘bi-annual’? If you mean ‘twice a year’ why not say that?

Making someone feel belittled or confused does nothing to enhance your reputation. In fact, it may well earn you a reputation for being superior, arrogant and a show-off. Using obfuscatory (confusing) words our customers and supporters don’t immediately understand isn’t impressive – it’s dumb.

So how can you enhance your reputation as a communicator and keep people ‘with you’ and tuned-in, rather than turned off and tuned-out?

Confuse and you’ll lose. Communicate in a way that builds rapport and makes people feel good about the interaction, and your reputation for being a gifted communicator will be assured.