Are You Really Serving Your Best Business Clients?

Serving your best business clients is part of everyone’s job description. Because how you serve impacts whether you retain these clients and sustain your business. How well are you doing?

Determining how you serve your best business clients starts by defining just who your best business clients are.

Still lumping your current clients together as long as they transact business with you? What is the value in this old-school mindset?

Consider that the key to identifying your best business clients revolves around how you segment your current client base. Too time consuming? Consider the following consequences of time well-spent.

Deconstruct your client base into these three basic customer segments.

First, which clients bring out the best in you, and vice versa? Over the years, these clients reward you. They provide a source of larger contracts, repeat business and even referral business. Also, consider the impact you both have on mutual productivity, profitability, sustainability and innovation.

What happens when all your customers are just like these customers?

Then, some clients offer contracts enticing enough to prevent you from walking away. When, perhaps, you should run away from them. Why? Because they are difficult to work with. And highly critical of your output. Throw in constantly shifting project prioritization. Voila! You have a client segment that thrives on a combination of drama and ambiguity. Oh, and these clients also drain employee energy in serving them.

How does retaining these clients impact the profitability, consistency and cultural quality of how you serve other clients?

Finally, you have clients who just never develop any further than their initial order. They repeat purchase that initial order, but nothing else. As a result, you eventually stop offering them more productive solutions. Consequently, how you serve them decreases the quality and innovation of how you serve the rest of your client base, too.

Is the majority of your revenue driven by unimaginative clients who flood your company with small orders? I do not even want to tell you how many of my clients made this discovery. However, what is the cost of keeping your head stuck in business sand?

Are you really serving your best business clients? Or simply serving any and every client who gives you business?

Customer retention is best catalyzed by individuals, teams and organizations who not only understand the difference between the three personas I describe. But also, who discover, develop and tell the stories of how you realized just who your best customers are.

And why you strategically decided to move one millimeter beyond yesterday’s client base and today’s comfortable mindset. So you can better serve tomorrow’s customers, together.

Get started today on a story-driven customer retention program with solid strategic business fundamentals. Isn’t it about time? Contact me at info@babettetenhaken.com.

My One Millimeter Mindset™  virtual and in-person keynotes, workshops, coaching and mastermind programs translate across strategic communication and collaboration disconnects between people and professional disciplines. Build trust. Retain employees and clients. Optimize strategic business and human capital value in your organizations. Get everyone to where they need to go. Together. One millimeter at a time.  My playbook of communication tools and methods, Do YOU Mean Business? is available on Amazon.com. Contact me here.

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