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Your existing customers are your cheapest revenue

Why the quarterly call is always the first thing to go, what to talk about, and how to stop it turning into a sales call.

About 6 minutes to read

Illustration: a customer card with a recurring conversation

The category that always goes first

When you're busy, your attention goes to whatever shouts: today's enquiry, the quote that's out, the customer on the phone. Existing customers don't shout. They're happy, they ring when they need something, and so you hear nothing for months.

Until suddenly they've gone. And then it turns out something had been going on for six months that you knew nothing about.

Which stings, because this is the easiest revenue there is. They know you, you don't have to explain yourself, and there's no quoting process with three competitors in it.

A rhythm you'll keep up

Once a quarter is enough for most service businesses. Four conversations per customer per year, a quarter of an hour each. With thirty customers that's roughly two calls a week.

More important than the frequency is that it's in the diary. An intention to "keep in touch more" won't survive a busy month. A task with a date will. Set it straight after the previous call, and you never have to think about it again.

What the conversation is about

This is where it usually goes wrong. If you ring with something to sell, the customer hears it in your first sentence, and then it's a sales call — exactly what they're used to from suppliers and exactly why they don't pick up.

Ring with one question: how are things with you? Not "how are you finding our product", because you'll get a polite answer to that. Ask about their work, how busy they are, what they're planning. If there's something to sell, it'll come out of their answer on its own — and then it's their idea.

Write down what you hear. An expansion coming up, someone leaving, a contract with another supplier coming to an end: those are the moments you come back to later, and they're recorded nowhere else.

Three things you get out of a call like that

  • An early warning. Dissatisfaction rarely arrives as a complaint; it arrives as a shorter answer than last time. You only notice that if you know how last time went.
  • A referral. The best time to ask whether they know anyone who needs the same thing is just after they've told you things are going well. See the piece on asking for referrals.
  • A contact you didn't have. People change jobs. If the only person who knows you walks out of the door without you hearing about it, you've quietly lost the customer.

Who to ring first

If you have thirty customers and you're starting today, don't go alphabetically. Start with whoever you haven't spoken to for longest — that's where the risk is, and it's also exactly the list your system can hand you.

After that: whoever brings in the most, and whoever you'd miss most if they left. Those two groups overlap less often than you'd think, and both deserve a call.

What to record

The same three lines as after any other conversation: what's going on, what you said, and when you'll come back. Plus the date for next quarter, straight away.

After a year you have four conversations per customer to read back through, and then you see things that are invisible in any one of them: that they get busier every quarter, or that the same irritation has come up for the third time.

Sources