No matter what type of business you happen to be a part of, one thing stands true no matter what: building a solid customer base is vital. It’s a universal principle of doing business.
And the very best part about building a strong base of clientele and customers is the fact that word of mouth referrals and repeat customers tend to snowball incredibly. Compounding customers is just like compounding interest!
Now this is really no big secret at all, but many neglect to realize the impact and power of an ever-growing customer base until it begins to happen. Here’s how to get there:
- Provide a desirable service or product.
- Work hard, especially in the beginning to get the word out.
- Develop a good rapport with new potential customers and clients.
- Offer your customers value (this could be financial value or anything else that’s valuable to them).
- Earn the sale.
- Deliver everything you’ve promised to your customer, exactly as expected.
- If any kinks arise in the process, be transparent and make it right.
- Express your sincere thankfulness to your customer.
- Potentially ask them for referrals (or at least make sure they know you’re open to new customers).
- Keep doing steps 1 through 9 above again and again.
Seems like common sense, right? That’s exactly what it really is, but it’s just a matter of following through with it all time and time again.
Before long, your highly-satisfied customers and clients will not only come back for more of a good thing themselves — they’ll also tell their own network of friends, associates, family, clients, and so on. This is powerful stuff here (and where things can begin to get very interesting)!
A Figurative Look At The Numbers
For this example, let’s assume that you are a freelancer offering web marketing services to your clients. You’ve started your new venture as a New Year’s resolution and you’re just getting started. End of month one, you now have a great little website promoting your services and have begun working hard to attract and earn the trust of new clients (probably through email, social media, or even the trusty but dreaded cold call).
After several unsuccessful contacts, the 12th person you contact decides they’ll give your service a try. It’s a small project and a week later, you’ve delivered on your promise. Client books a bigger project. In the meantime, you’ve successfully secured 3 additional new clients. All is well.
About two months after you’ve completed the project for your first new client, you get a phone call from a business associate of theirs — this person is looking for someone to help them out as well. Deal is made. Now guess what?
Because of just this one initial client, there’s now two good clients. That’s 100% "compounding client interest" right there alone. Now those other 3 clients you’ve started working with before… 2 are highly satisfied and maybe the third decides to go a different direction.
At any rate, let’s assume each of your 4 existing active clients refer you to 3 more new clients over the course of the year. End of year one: your client list of 4 hard-earned customers has now grown to 16 (for the work of attaining just 4).
Now let’s count on another successful year for year two. Each of your "referrals" now in-turn refers you to 3 new active clients on their own part. That’s 52 clients for the work of the initial 4 in the beginning. As you can see, it only compounds from here!
In The End…
It doesn’t matter what business you’re in or what your product or service is. Work hard at earning a few good clients in the beginning and before you know it, you’ll have more referrals than you’re able to handle. Compounding customers is just like compou
Until Next Time.
George Chaney
President/CEO
SEO King, Inc.
