Retention - More leads and clients part 3
A Quick Recap
It’s important for me to emphasise that what we’ve been doing here together in the series is looking at the challenge of how to generate more leads and clients through a particular framework, a way of thinking about it. I find frameworks like this useful because they help give me a structured approach. Without a framework, you could basically say there are a million different things you can do if you want to win more clients and leads. But when you start framing it up with a structure, it can make it more methodical and strategic.
The way I’ve broken up this approach is exactly the way I think about things and the strategy I’ve used in my business. To give you a quick summary of the process so far, the steps are:
Acquisition
Leverage
Retention
In episode one about acquisition, that was all about the process of acquiring new clients, basically getting their attention, making an offer, and winning their business. In that episode, I focused on the main ways I recommend you consider for winning new clients. Most importantly, I emphasised the importance of choosing one that’s right for you, committing to it, and developing a level of mastery in it. At the same time, choosing a second minor or complementary lead generation method to help support you.
Episode two was all about leverage. There, I specifically meant leveraging the work you’ve already done, the clients you already have, and the proof you’ve built up to help make it easier to win new work. In that episode, I talked about the idea of a byproduct, the secondary gain you get from doing something. When you’re making work for your clients, always think about the byproduct. Think about not only delivering great work, but what byproducts can come from this work that can help you sell future similar work. This is all about documenting the process, sharing the story, capturing testimonials and case studies, and then presenting this content to future prospects. This has been one of the most important things that’s helped me build my business. There are video jobs I can think of that have led to so much future work because I’ve been able to leverage the byproduct from making that video.
Why Retention Matters
Now let’s move to step three in the three-step framework, which is retention. Retention is a fancy way of saying keeping the clients you’ve got and continuing to do more work with them. I’ve actually already done an episode on retention, and I’ve deliberately not gone back to it or read the transcript. So I’m going to have another crack at covering this topic from a different angle because it’s that important.
A Different Way of Looking at Client Relationships
Let me start by sharing a short story. Recently, one of my coaching clients was expressing his fear and concern about a client he has on retainer. The fear was around that client maybe leaving or not wanting to work with him anymore. I can relate to that feeling, which I’ve had over the years, particularly with my biggest clients.
For many years in running my business, it was kind of a crazy situation because I would have a handful of best clients who were doing lots of regular work with us, spending a good amount of money, and seemed really happy. But at the same time, I felt this gnawing uncertainty of what would happen to the business if they decided to leave, which made it hard on some levels to really just enjoy the fact that we had these great clients.
Over the years, my philosophy on this has shifted, which has been really liberating for me. Most of that fear and uncertainty has now disappeared because I think of it in a different way.
Rather than spending time agonising about whether and when a client will want to leave, I start with the fundamental knowledge that, basically, when it comes down to it, everything ends. Nothing lasts forever. I operate on the assumption, and to some degree, acceptance, that one day this client will leave. One day, the relationship will end.
Armed with that reality, my whole focus is on this: how can I keep this relationship going as long as possible? How can I keep the game going as long as possible?
Playing the Long Game
The game with business is essentially how to acquire and keep a customer. If you can create a situation, create an environment where people want to stick around for a long time and buy repeatedly, there’s a good chance you will have a very healthy business.
But if you think about it from your own experience and businesses you’ve used over the years, service providers, restaurants and cafes, there might be a handful of situations where you’ve bought from the same place your whole life. In many situations, at some point, circumstances change and you move on.
You’ve been going to the same restaurant for many years, but you have one bad meal or one bad experience, it puts you off, and you don’t return. A camera operator’s been shooting for you for years, but they do something to annoy you, or undermine you, or there’s something wrong with the work, and you don’t work together again. Or maybe something just comes along that’s better or suits your needs, which have changed. That’s just the nature of things.
Creating the Kind of Experience People Stay For
But then, at the same time, if you think about the handful of very long-term relationships you’ve had, where you’ve been consistently well looked after, where the service provider has not only delivered on your needs but anticipated your needs, in some ways known even better than you have what it is that you really need, or the quality of their work has been so standout that you’ve just felt like it would be crazy to go somewhere else.
That’s what it’s all about. That’s what this episode on retention is.
How can you curate an experience for your clients so they’ll want to stick around and keep using your services over and over again over a number of years?
For my business, that’s been the key to my success, establishing strong long-term relationships built on trust and respect.
It’s all very well to win a $10,000 or $20,000 or $50,000 job. That’s nice. What’s even nicer is when you think about a client and think, “Wow, we’ve been working together for seven years. They’ve invested hundreds of thousands of dollars into the business, and we have a great relationship.”
That’s the sort of thing that makes all the difference. Of course, not every client will fit into that category. Not everyone needs that level or volume of work. But some do. And it’s a beautiful thing to keep on uncovering that needle in the haystack.
Treat Every Client Like They Could Become Your Best Client
The thing I found, though, is when I think about the best clients that I have and have had in the past, the ones who have done 10, 20, 50 or 100 jobs with my business, it’s been impossible for me to predict who those clients would have been.
So one of the best pieces of advice I can give you about how to retain clients is to treat every client you work with as if they could maybe end up being one of those clients that stays with you for the next five or ten years and invests hundreds of thousands of dollars into your business.
Or if not, they might be the person who refers you to someone else who becomes that client.
Great Retention Starts with Great Delivery
So the first thing to focus on in retention is delivery, delivering the actual service to your clients and giving them a great experience and a great video. In fact, you could say that making the work is actually the best form of marketing. Giving people an awesome experience and them then wanting to come back or tell other people about you.
These days, there’s lots of talk about the idea of recurring income and packages, which is like a formal way of locking people into regularly spending money with your business. But just having strong retention through delivering an awesome experience is the same thing in a less formal way.
Relationships Matter
Creating a great relationship with a client is in many ways similar to creating any kind of great relationship.
If you think about friends and colleagues you’ve had over the years, the ones where you formed a really good relationship, it’s basically the same principles: investing time and energy into the relationship, being respectful, being consistent, being a good listener, genuinely caring, and also making yourself a little bit vulnerable.
The best way to make yourself vulnerable with a client as a creative is to genuinely care about the work you make, to put a bit of your heart and soul into it, and to be prepared to be disappointed or a little bit hurt, or have a moment of feeling insulted when a client either doesn’t appreciate what you do, or you spend days cutting together an awesome video, and after round after round of changes, they decimate the video until it’s half as good as what it originally was.
You know the type of situation I’m talking about.
The fact that that type of situation is annoying or disappointing means that you care. It means you’re prepared to put yourself on the line. This is the type of thing that clients value. They value the fact that it’s more than just transactional. They can feel that you are in their corner, and you are prepared to do what it takes to help get a great result.
For the right client, to go above and beyond to please them and give them an awesome experience.
Trust Over Transactions
I’m not talking about having no boundaries or allowing yourself to be pushed around. I’m talking about using opportunities to show clients that you genuinely care about them and want to get a great result for them.
In my case, one way I show that is to not be obsessive about rounds of changes with clients of mine that matter. Like if a client’s invested $10,000 or $20,000 into a video, and her boss asks for one extra round of changes, I’m not going to send through an additional invoice for a couple of hundred bucks that she’s now got to go and get another purchase order for and deal with a whole lot of bureaucratic stuff.
The reason why I’m able to do this is because I’m choosing good clients in the first place, and they’re paying well, so that gives me some flexibility.
I’ve developed trust and respect with them. I don’t feel compelled to send them their video in low resolution with time code plastered all over it and wait for their final payment to clear.
I’m operating on a higher level with them, with a much deeper sense of trust and respect, and them seeing me as a strategic partner and part of their mission.
If you can develop the right type of relationships with decent, trustworthy people, sure, you may get hurt or disappointed occasionally, but you will be more than compensated by the deep, strong relationships you’ll build.
Staying Top of Mind
Once the job’s done, how do you keep that relationship going? How do you stay in touch?
There are some real basics here that are sometimes easy to forget:
Connecting on LinkedIn
Posting regularly to keep them updated and stay top of mind
Taking an interest in them and what they are doing
Sharing something interesting with them, if you feel like it’s appropriate
Sending out a monthly newsletter update, again, to stay top of mind, but also to educate them about other things your business does that they might not be aware of, or share ideas and examples which might prompt them to want to do future projects
A lot of this stuff is instinctual human stuff that can be easy to forget about and not attend to, because you become so caught up in the day-to-day running of the business. Or you get so caught up in just trying to deliver work to people that have jobs on now, that you sort of forget about and neglect the people you’ve already done work for.
Questions to Think About
At this stage, I’d encourage you to think about your current clients or clients you’ve worked with in the past:
What are you doing to continue to nurture the relationship?
What can you do to give people a better experience so you can increase the chance of them wanting to stick around and keep working with you?
Who are some of the people or businesses that you have bought from for years and years, that you have developed a great relationship with?
What are the qualities of those businesses or people, and what can you learn from them and incorporate into your own business?
Turning Customers into Clients
When I started off this series, I emphasised the difference between a customer and a client. A customer is something quite transactional, someone who needs a thing, pays you, and then you give them the thing.
A client is an actual relationship based on ongoing interaction, based on trust, based on listening, based on care.
Which is why, when I outlined our task of how to get more leads and clients, I emphasised retention so much because retention is how you turn customers into clients.
The longer you work together, the more the relationship deepens, and the more people move from being customers to clients.
Final Thoughts
If you’d like some help putting these ideas into practice, that’s exactly what I do through my coaching program for video production business owners.
Whether you’re trying to win more clients, improve your pricing, build stronger systems, or simply create a business that’s more profitable and enjoyable to run, I’d love to help.
To find out more or book a call, visit ryanspanger.com/coaching
