When you create storytelling experiences your clients crave, your professional relationships move beyond transacting business. Instead, your relationships become transformational for you both.
How do you get from where you are now, with your storytelling experiences, to where you need to go?
Build your business based on retaining clients who are fully co-invested in the transformational potential described in the stories you tell.
First, retain clients through storytelling experiences about them and the business world in which they live.
Any time anyone does business with someone else, whether it’s buying a product or an IoT engineered connected solution, risk is involved. How does your story address risk, as well as opportunity? Because the last thing a first-time client wants to experience is an overpromised, under-delivered solution that is not robust-enough to remain competitive over its lifecycle.
After all, how many of your clients have gotten burned in the past investing in non-optimal products or solutions?
Next, retain clients through storytelling experiences that uncover what it is like to work with you after the sale is closed or the designed solution is implemented.
Go for it. Tell the stories which address your clients’ biggest fears: being abandoned by you and your organization until contract renewal. Their business life “happens” in the time in-between acquisition, implementation and renewal. That in-between time is when all the business mess and chaos usually happens. Then, consider that the business mess and chaos may have nothing to do with your product or solution. Will you have your clients’ backs, even if your product or program isn’t involved?
That is the unspoken customer retention test living in the back of every client’s mind.
Then, create storytelling experiences based on “what it’s like” renewal programs. At the same time you are closing the first sale or delivering that initial solution.
Any business or STEM Professional of Worth needs to create client experiences that combine strategic planning with meeting tactical needs. In today’s rapidly changing, Internet of Things technical environments, today’s solution requires continuous updating. Not just once a year, or once a renewal or replacement period.
These are the transformational stories your clients crave hearing, if you want to retain them as clients.
Are your storytelling skills falling short of creating a retained client base full of clients who crave the stories you tell? Take the next step to start telling the stories that retain successful clients invested in you. Click on this link. Let’s start telling your story, together.
Babette’s Story:
My One Millimeter Mindset® Storytelling Programs leverage purpose-driven value differentiation through storytelling, to create and retain successful employees and clients. Especially in Internet of Things, transforming industries comprised of STEM and left-brain stakeholders working in concert with non-technical stakeholders. Have I just described your business or association? I am a member of SME, ASQ, SHRM and the National Speakers Association. My playbook of communication tools, Do YOU Mean Business? available on Amazon.com, jump starts your storytelling success. Take the next steps: contact me here.
Image source: iStock / Getty Images
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