Best Sales Tip: Stay in Touch and Keep the Wolves at Bay!
If you have a lot of contact with people or are in a service related business, the best sales tip I can give you is you must stay in touch. Especially with customers, or potential ones. It’s the most important thing you can do with your time. Depending on what you do, staying in touch may mean being in contact with patients, students, or other business associates. It really doesn’t matter-you’re providing some kind of product or service for them. The message is the same, STAY IN TOUCH.
Good customers are a lot like an oasis. Once you find them, they’re precious. They should be like water in the desert to you, a matter of life and death. You’ve worked hard to find them and make them yours. You never want to lose touch with them, stay out of contact with them, or worst of all, let someone else steal your “bucket of water” from right under your nose. To make it impossible for these thieves to pick your pocket, your best weapon is staying in touch with the prize they’re after—your customers. Always let your customers know how important and special they are to you. Let them know you don’t take their business for granted, and tell them often.
In fact, customer relationship building should be your number one priority. If you think you’re done once you’ve sold something to a customer, you’ve got it all wrong. The real selling begins after the sale. It’s a well-known fact that it’s a lot cheaper to keep an existing customer than it is to go out and find a new one. Prospecting for new customers should be your second priority. Why? Because there will never be a greater business asset to you than your existing customer base—your number one priority. They already know who you are and what you can do for them. They represent your greatest growth potential. STAY IN TOUCH with these people.
The idea behind staying in touch with customers is pretty basic—you do it to keep them. As an auto motivational speaker I always tell my audience that a great part of the financial success I enjoyed later in my career came from repeat business that I worked hard and smart to retain. If you respect people, treat them right, and keep in touch with them, they’ll become yours for as long as you want them. If you stick to a disciplined plan for staying in touch with your customers, they should never find a good reason for leaving you. I embraced this concept early on in my career, and it served me well.