The Goldmine In Your Existing Customer Base

Your existing customers represent a potential goldmine…

Offering and selling more to your existing customers is the easiest way to boost long-term profits.

You have already established a strong relationship with them and because of that it’s 30-60 times easier to sell to them.

So if you’re only selling one product right now, focus on creating an ongoing stream of products to offer them. Design the buyer’s journey…a topic I will return to in the future.

But let’s say you’re at the stage of only having one product to sell. How you can leverage your relationships to provide more value?

What else can you sell to your existing customers? What more do they need to be successful? (For example, they may need a trusted financial planner, attorney, web designer, etc.) Using the answers to these questions, establish the right joint ventures and use your strong relationships to offer these additional products and services.

Let’s go deeper…

I try to live and breathe the 80/20-rule in my personal and professional life.

What are the implications of this for my customers and me?

I know that approximately 80% of my profits comes from 20% of my customers.

This means – don’t treat your customers as though they are all equal. They are not. I discussed getting rid of the bottom 20% of your customers in my last email. Similarly, you want to focus most of your time on the top 20% of your existing customers.

Take your full list of customers and assign values to them based on strength of relationship, level of current business, and lifetime value of the customer. Draw a line under the top 20%.

What more you can offer them? Remember, these are your top revenue producers and are far more interested in the amount of value you offer rather than price.

Try to create something uniquely special for them. It’s worth emailing and calling them personally if needed. Do a monthly offer by email, direct mail, phone call or face-to-face.

Next time you fly internationally think about the airline’s top 20% of customers. They are all sitting in first and business class. First class pays for the whole plane. They are treated like royalty and will pay a huge premium for this. The customer believes it’s worth it.

What can you do to provide products and services to your top 20% customers?