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My last post was entitled “Show Up”.
It was about how virtually all 7 figure earners will faithfully turn up to programs and attend every session in a course where many others drop out after the the 2nd or 3rd meetings.
If you find you are experiencing a similar issue with client burn out there are a couple of things that you can do to extend the average “lifetime” of your clients.
The first and most obvious is to make sure that your product is meeting the needs of your ideal client and that it’s delivered in such a way that they actually get value out of it.
The second, often over-looked tactic, is to educate your clients in regard to what they will be feeling and thinking and when.
For example, in the later 1990′s I was running a three year curriculum based workshop program for business owners called the Entrepreneurs Success Programme (ESP) where clients would attend a workshop every 3 months over the 3 years.
As a part of the new client orientation process we would explain that sometime between the 2nd and 3rd meeting they may feel like they are not making progress and would want to give up. We would also tell them why that was not a good idea and we provided testimonials of other clients who had felt the same but who had persisted and were glad they had done so because of the great results they were getting.
This is like a “pre-emptive” strike. When the client began to think about quitting they generally recalled what we had said and more often than not they would choose to continue.
Depending on the group and the year, we normally had between 67% – 75% of our clients renewing from year 1 to 2 and 90% renewal rate from year 2 to 3.
We were the envy of every competitor including the universities and institutes of management.
By way contrast, an internationally recognized private sector competitor of ours, also marketing a 3 year business development programme, was literally losing 90% of clients before the 6 month mark.
Why? Well the truth is I don’t know for sure but I can take a guess.
The quality of our competitors clients appeared to be similar to ours so that was not a factor.
But we packaged our content in workshops and CDs whereas our competitor packaged it all in a series or booklets and we also kept our content very pragmatic and shied away from nice theories.
We also did a very good job of creating realistic expectations in our marketing message (see my post “The Perfectly Balanced Marketing Message”) and we extended that “expectation education” process during the new client orientation process as mentioned above.
The preemptive strike is an excellent client retention tactic – figure out what clients and thinking and when they will probably start thinking that. Then include that as a part of your client orientation program.