Instant Repeat Business

Other Books in the Instant Success Series

Successful Franchising by Bradley J. Sugars

The Real Estate Coach by Bradley J. Sugars

Billionaire in Training by Bradley J. Sugars

Instant Cashflow by Bradley J. Sugars

Instant Sales by Bradley J. Sugars

Instant Leads by Bradley J. Sugars

Instant Profit by Bradley J. Sugars

Instant Promotions by Bradley J. Sugars

Instant Team Building by Bradley J. Sugars

Instant Systems by Bradley J. Sugars

Instant Referrals by Bradley J. Sugars

Instant Advertising by Bradley J. Sugars

The Business Coach by Bradley J. Sugars

Copyright © 2006 by Bradley J. Sugars. All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the United States Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced or distributed in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

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Dedicated to all Action Business Coaches, leaders in every sense of the word.

CONTENTS

Introduction

How to Use This Book

Charlie’s Repeat Business Roller Coaster

PART 1—Newsletters

PART 2—Closed-Door Sales

PART 3—Loyalty Strategies

PART 4—Worth Considering

Testing and Measuring

Getting into Action

About the Author

Recommended Reading List

The 18 Most Asked Questions about Working with an Action International Business Coach

Action Contact Details

INTRODUCTION

Hanging on to an existing customer is far easier, and much cheaper, than looking for a new one. It never ceases to amaze me how few businesses realize this. They seem to have it ingrained in their thinking that the business cycle must remain sharply focused on continually hunting for new customers. They allocate large sums of money to advertising and marketing, trusting this will lure prospects from the opposition or entice others to buy products they really hadn’t thought about or had a need for.

Take a look around and observe the way the vast majority of businesses conduct themselves. Notice the thrust of their activities. Become sensitive to the messages they’re putting out.

What should strike you is their relentless effort to fish for new business. They seem infatuated with appealing to a fresh group of potential customers. They seem obsessed with appealing to people who have never dealt with them before.

But what about their existing customers? Have they been forgotten, or is it just assumed that once a person becomes a customer, they’ll remain a customer? Most pay very little attention to keeping close to their existing customers at all. In fact, most would have no idea who their existing customers are and how to make contact with them.

I have eaten at many restaurants in my time, and I’m not on any databases. I’ve never received a letter from any of them asking me to dine there again. Yet I know these restaurants spend large sums on advertising and marketing efforts like offering discounted meals to new patrons. How much easier, and cheaper, would it be to look after existing patrons? They’d be able to comfortably predict future ordering requirements, not to mention cashflow, if they pandered to an existing, loyal, customer base. You see, happy customers are always willing to return because they feel comfortable with the entire setup—the product, the atmosphere, the staff, and the pricing. People like to avoid the unknown as much as possible and don’t like taking chances, especially when they’re paying for it.

How do you ensure that those customers you already have make repeat purchases? How do you get them to buy more from you? Useful techniques will be outlined in this book. You’ll learn the secrets to ensuring that your customers feel so special they’ll do your selling for you!

This book is all about looking after repeat business. It’s all about ensuring that your existing client base remains happy, loyal, and content with your business. It’s all about ensuring that you look after that 20 percent of your customer base that accounts for 80 percent of your revenue. It’s all about turning your existing customers into your most prized asset—Raving Fans.

To make sure you understand clearly where repeat business fits into your business cycle, I’m going to briefly mention a very important concept. This is the concept I call The Business Chassis. Read more about this in my book Instant Cashflow.

The Business Chassis looks like this:

As you can see, repeat business has to do with that part of the Business Chassis called Number of Transactions. The process began when you decided to generate leads (read my books Instant Leads and Instant Promotions for more in-depth information about this) and ended up with some prospects. These you converted into customers by selling to them (read my book Instant Sales for more on this). Your task now is to ensure that they continue doing business with you.

So, congratulations on deciding to take proactive steps to growing your business. By concentrating on first things first, you’ll set in motion a chain of activities that will generate more business for you by increasing your number of transactions. I personally guarantee it.

How to Use This Book

This book is divided into different parts, one for each of the major areas I’ll be discussing.

Pick the part that interests you most, jump right in, and begin working through the steps outlined. You see, there are things you must give careful consideration to before getting carried away doing the fun things involved in chasing repeat business.

You’ll notice repetition in many of the steps outlined. This is because this book outlines, in practical terms, how to go about improving the number of transactions your business currently enjoys from each customer.

You might decide to implement all the great ideas explained in this book all at once. Or you might decide to implement them one at a time. But whatever you decide, the important thing is you’ll no longer be blundering around in the dark, unsure whether what you’re doing has a chance of increasing the number of times each customer buys from you, or not.

We’ll visit Charlie, my trusted mechanic, and catch up with him as he devises strategies to get his customers to do business with him more often. You see, he had come to realize his mechanical workshop was, in reality, only providing him with a job. He realized he was working harder as a small business owner than he did when he worked as a mechanic for someone else. Sure, he’s great at what he does and I swear by him. But at the end of the day his business was going nowhere.

He called me in and asked for help. He wanted me to coach him to business success. This I agreed to do, and so began a Mentoring Program aimed at turning his business around. He was apprehensive at first, feeling more like a fish out of water than a mechanic doing his best to grow his business. But he soon got over that as he discovered marketing could be fun. He began to realize that it was something anybody could do well if they tried. The mystique of marketing soon began to disappear as we worked our way through some of the concepts and strategies selected for his business.

Sit in on this next coaching session as we delve into the age-old question of getting people to do business with you more often.

You might also be surprised at how much this exercise will reveal about your business. It may get you thinking about important issues that have never crossed your mind before. If some of this information is new to you, don’t be concerned—there’s never been a better time to start improving the way you run your business.

Make sure you make notes as you go along. When you come to deciding what you’re going to do to improve your bottom line, you’ll find it useful referring back to them. You’ll find proven examples and ideas that, when combined with your new knowledge, will bring results.

Now it’s time to get started. There are customers out there waiting to deal with you.

Charlie’s Repeat Business Roller Coaster

I knew Charlie was looking forward to this session. Getting customers to remain customers seemed to be the one area he was having difficulty in. He told me he found this strange, as he knew the quality of his workmanship was high and his customers always seemed more than satisfied.

I, too, was looking forward to showing him how he could chase repeat business. He was now very used to thinking like a business owner and not a mechanic, or a worker for that matter. I helped him see he needed to ensure he didn’t end up an employee in his own business, and that’s exactly the way he was heading. He was spending far too much time working in the business and not on it, and that had to change.

Good morning, Charlie, I said as I entered his small office and looked through the window into the busy workshop. I habitually did that just to see what delights he had in at the time.

I haven’t seen that Maserati before, I said. New customer?

Yeah, phoned in after my last ad. And he wasn’t the only one, Brad. I received 15 calls and of those, 5 have either made appointments for a service or have already been in. Not bad, huh?

That’s terrific, Charlie. That’s a 30 percent conversion rate.

Yes, I know. But what I’m really looking forward to now is increasing their number of transactions.

"You’ve come a long way, Charlie. You’re already talking like a businessman! In fact, you’re doing better than that—you’re thinking like a businessman."

It’s just like you said, Brad. If I can do it, anyone can.

As always, I was going to start the session off by going back to basics. It never hurts to go over some of the ground rules and fundamental concepts.

"As you know, to be classified as a customer, your prospect needs to have spent money, and you need to have recorded the sale in your database. This last step may seem strange, but it is most important because it allows you to differentiate on your database between prospects and customers. You see, if you are planning to send a letter out to all prospects offering them an incentive to come and have work