A purpose-driven client retention strategy leverages your own stories. Are the stories you currently tell purpose-driven and authentic? Or, do your stories sound artificial, non-essential, insubstantial?
By now, you have told stories to many colleagues and clients. Ponder whether the stories you tell are your own stories, shared during business and design meetings. Alternatively, do the stories you tell come from a third-party resource? These stories are not about you and your clients, at all. Yet, you are instructed to use these stories, during specific stages of client development to move a decision forward.
- How memorable are your stories?
- If so, which stories resound most with clients?
- And, are these stories directly related to their own stories?
- Have you ever asked your clients these questions?
Realistic and believable stories form the cornerstone of your purpose-driven client retention strategy.
If you never ask clients about the relevance and credibility of the stories you tell, you short sell the value you bring to their business tables.
- Perhaps you are not invested in storytelling as an essential component of business growth. As a result, you view stories as decorative elements. Because the main purpose of your conversation always focuses on closing the deal or determining design specifications. An outcome you need to accomplish for yourself.
- Then again, perhaps a client tells you the story you shared last time you spoke represents the deal-maker in your relationship. But, because you do not pay serious attention to the importance of any form of storytelling, let alone purpose-driven storytelling, you have absolutely no recall of what story you told.
Developing a purpose-driven client retention strategy connects your story to your clients’ stories.
When you intentionally commit to storytelling as an essential element of business growth, stories become more than chunks of rehearsed or casual dialogue. Delivered at specific phases of the selling cycle. Or, thrown in as commentary to fill in conversational gaps during design development.
Consider that putting in the work to discover and develop your purpose-driven stories is not a bunch of fluff. Purpose-driven stories are your own, real life, boots-on-the-ground stories. About actual business and design scenarios. Where things did not go linearly or even very well, at all. Stories which are not perfect fairy-tales.
- The stories which retain customers are about the times when you and your clients listened well to each other.
- And made some hard calls as a result of your respectful, insightful and brutally honest conversations.
- About having the confidence to be fully present and in the moment with each other.
- Rather than role-playing according to the anticipated behavior of your professional disciplines.
These stories are your courageous, compelling and purpose-driven stories. Start retaining more clients: Today, Tomorrow and Future-forward. Are you ready?
Let’s storytell. One millimeter at a time. Together.
My One Millimeter Mindset® Storytelling Speaking Programs leverage storytelling as an essential element to catalyze your purpose-driven professional development and employee and client success and retention. Read my own professional story here. My communication playbook, Do You Mean Business?, should get you started, too.
Then, move your first millimeter step forward and contact me here. Let’s storytell. One Millimeter at a time. Together.
Image source: Adobe Stock
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