Crippled CEO Blog #141:
Every business THINKS it wants new customers.
And that’s partly true. Customers are important.
But the truth is, if you really want to be a thriving, profitable enterprise, you don’t just need customers — you need clients.
What’s the difference?
A customer buys from you once. A client is an ongoing customer whom you are building a relationship with.
And while this seems obvious, focusing on the wrong one creates different strategies with different goals.
If you decide that your primary goal is to get new customers, you might end up with a case of “corporate schizophrenia” — a term coined by my business mentor and dad to describe something he found particularly irritating.
Corporate schizophrenia, according to dad, is when a business works real hard to get new customers, but then treats them like garbage once they have them. It’s like the company has multiple personalities, thus the term.
That’s what happens when you decide you are focusing on getting new customers — when the goals you decide on are all about new customer acquisition and those are the numbers you are tracking. That’s how you end up with corporate schizophrenia.
However, if you also make a point to put plans and systems in place to turn customers into clients and then to focus on client retention, then you can avoid this tragic diagnosis. Last week I talked about allocating a good sized portion of your marketing budget to highlighting customers, celebrating them, and making others aspire to be them. When I spoke about this last week, the idea was that celebrating customers publicly was an excellent way to get more customers. This is also a good first step to turn them into clients, also (you can read last week’s blog for more on the specifics there).
Beyond that, though, every business is different, but if you decide to make turning customers into clients and then keeping those clients a priority, you’ll start the process of finding the ways to do just that.
(I’ll always be your mom’s #1 client. Your mom also gets a text from me every Sunday with a link to the latest blog post. Send a text to 561-726-1567 with the word CRIP as the message to get a link to the blog as soon as it’s up.
Did you know that I have a YouTube channel now? I do! I am putting up two videos every single week. Go search for Crippled CEO and you’ll find me. I would appreciate it if you subscribed.)
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