Brian Halligan, the CEO of Hubspot, is pitching a webinar on steps to accelerate your growth next year (we are probably also going to roll out a few tidbits along the way, too), and might have inadvertently put one of the most important planning devices in the teaser email:
It costs 7x more to acquire a new customer than it does to retain an existing one.
We’ve known this for some time, so we’ve counselled something like a 50/50 or 60/40 split on acquiring/retaining customers. Or, take a look at why customers were lost last year and what could be done to retain more of them. How long had they been customers? Was it a service issue? You can’t please ’em all, but you can probably do better than you’re doing.
And, we’ve had more than one client find that they’ve got a ton of leads that weren’t properly worked by the sales folks, and lapsed back into the ether of the CRM system. Good place to start new salespeople.
And, speaking of customer lists, past customers should be called to see if they’re alive, know your company is alive and wants to know what you can do for them