Companies invest significant resources into lead generation, marketing, and sales strategies to attract new leads. However, the secret to success lies in the careful preservation of the clients you already have.
In today’s episode, Samantha and Tim take us on a journey into the often-overlooked realm of client retention. As business owners, it’s easy to get caught up in the excitement of attracting new clients but this episode underscores the notion that retaining existing clients is equally, if not more, critical for long-term growth.
The episode navigates various strategies and tactics that can be employed to improve client retention. From creating a sense of community among clients to extending the length of contracts, they share the practical steps you can take to transform casual customers into devoted advocates for your business.
IN THIS EPISODE YOU’LL DISCOVER:
- The cost of attracting new clients vs retaining existing clients (01:38)
- Discover the strategy that will revolutionise your client retention rates (06:40)
- The game-changing approach that keeps clients committed for longer (07:53)
- Addressing client roadblocks and personalising the client experience (10:15)
- The impact of community on client retention (13:05)
- The most overlooked part of the client journey – get this right and you’ll dramatically increase your client retention (14:16)
QUOTES
- “When you’ve got the support of a community that understands and empathises with what you’re going through, it creates a very tight bond. Creating a community of your clients can be a great retention strategy.” -Samantha Riley
- “People think marketing is just building a website, putting a pretty brand on it, and running Facebook ads. But marketing is also about equally measuring your client retention.” -Tim Hyde
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WHERE TO FIND TIM HYDE
- Website: https://winmoreclients.com.au/
- Facebook: Win More Clients
- Instagram: Win More Clients
- LinkedIn: Tim Hyde
CONNECT WITH SAMANTHA RILEY
- Facebook: Samantha Riley
- Instagram: @thesamriley
- LinkedIn: Samantha Riley
- Twitter: @thesamriley
TRANSCRIPTION
(This transcription is AI-generated and may contain inaccuracies.)
Samantha Riley Snippet (00:00):
The one thing that I think is mostly overlooked in client retention, and I don’t hear very many people talking about this, but this, I think, is even more valuable than all of those things together. This is onboarding.
Onboarding for client retention is so important, because right from the beginning of your fiscal contract, you’re setting clear expectations in this is what you can expect from me. And this is what I expect from you.
Tim Hyde Snippet (00:33):
It’s not just a commitment of cash that they’ve made. And here’s what I promise for the cash. There’s this other relationship, where if we work together, we’ll get your result not. If we do the work and you have to do nothing, you will get your result.
One of the things that I do in our onboarding experiences, I actually tell my client what makes him an A client.
Samantha Riley Intro (00:49):
Welcome to the Influence By Design Podcast. I’m Samantha Riley, authority positioning strategist for coaches and experts. If you’re ready to build a business that gives you more than just a caffeine addiction, and you dream of making more money, having more time, and having the freedom to be living your best life, then you’re in the right place, it’s time to level up.
Welcome to today’s episode of Influence By Design. I’m your co host for today’s Samantha Riley and joined as always on Thursday by the lovely Tim Hyde. How are you, Tim?
Tim Hyde (01:27):
Hello, I am I good.
Samantha Riley (01:31):
Excellent. Today we’re going to talk about client retention. And I think this is a really, really valuable topic. Because a lot of people talk about lead generation, they talk about marketing, they talk about sales, for very few people talk about client and retention.
And why this is so important is that it costs more to acquire a new customer or a new client than it does to keep the clients that you already have. And it’s just so makes so much more business sense to keep the customers that you already have for a few reasons.
Number one, you when you get new clients, they’re adding on to the top, you’re not replacing your clients. So you’re increasing your client base. But also I don’t know about you, Tim, but I find it a lot easier to work with clients that you’ve had for a while, then continually bringing in new clients, getting
Tim Hyde (02:29):
new clients, it’s hard work. We know that right? And I think the the conventional stat but because it gets thrown around, says it’s about eight times more expensive to get a new client than then keep an existing one.
Now that we’re talking dollar cost, as well as time cost to get that new client, right. And so let’s put it this, put it in some context, okay, with something that I think everyone will understand, I use for something quite a lot. If you were to go on new dates, say you break up with your significant other.
Samantha Riley (03:02):
It sounds horrible. I just don’t even like this story in the first place. But keep going.
Tim Hyde (03:07):
Trust me, trust me, this will make sense. Because I know you’ve you’ve been divorced before. And you have a wonderful new partner early on now. Yes. But I imagine imagine for a moment.
You know, you, you find yourself single you back onto the dating scene, and you’re looking for a new life partner. Okay? You don’t necessarily find the right one. First go unless you’re super lucky. Absolutely happens.
But you’ll go on a whole bunch of dates. So you might go on 10 dates with 10 different people. And then five of those people you go on second dates with and you know, one or two of those people you go on third dates with before you go yep, this is the long run.
But all of that investment costing going on those extra dates to find your new partner is sunk cost. All right. Once you’ve got that partner, much easier to keep them just need to remember, you know, important dates and anniversaries and just the little things,
Samantha Riley (04:07):
I thought you were going to say you just have to remember then
Tim Hyde (04:10):
this half, hopefully you’ll remember,
Samantha Riley (04:13):
oh my goodness, that killed me.
Tim Hyde (04:17):
Much easier to keep a partner, you’ve already gotten the same way that it’s much easier to keep a client you don’t have to invest as much right to keep a new client as you do to win a new one in the same way that why because you don’t have to do all that relationship building.
You already know about them. You’re not having to do that onboarding call again. You’re not having to deal with that business discovery about where they’re at and what their goals are, again, you already know that stuff. And so it becomes much easier to get them.
I think what some what people sort of miss in terms of client retention is unmatched. The only industry I can think of that probably doesn’t have great client retention other than maybe funerals or having just had hand surgery. I’m hoping I don’t have to go and see my surgeon again anytime soon.
I’m believer later, I might potentially go back to the same surgeon, the end, because I trust them to cut me open. A second time is that, you know, particularly for coaching and consulting, we typically don’t have a great client retention.
Right? 50 to 60 60%. So if you count up all the clients that you’ve had in your business, and go, how many of these are still with me? Right? If we keep having to go back and date, again, you know, the proverbial date, it’s very, very difficult to then grow a business.
Absolutely. Right. And if you’ve got less than 50%, it’s, you’ll find yourself, we’ve talked about it, you find yourself getting to a certain point, and going, why can I get past this revenue figure?
Samantha Riley (05:55):
I see a lot of people very frustrated, because they go through the win, and the excitement of a new client, and then lose an old client, get a new client lose an old client, and there’s this constant status quo of of nothing moving.
And I think when we were doing some research for this episode, you were saying the average retention rate or the average churn, I’m not sure which way you were saying,
Tim Hyde (06:20):
You’re gonna flip it on one side, once once potential downsides turn around. So for Yeah, so
Samantha Riley (06:25):
it was saying, or you found that the average for Coaches and Consultants is 50, to 60%, which means that the end of the year, you will have lost half the clients that you acquired, which sounds like a lot of hard work.
Tim Hyde (06:40):
It is alright. And it just means after everything about that on after two years, you’re down to let’s I imagine you signed 25 clients in, in the first year by year two, you’ve only got 12 of those by the year.
Three, you’re down to 656 of those and have to replace the other 19 clients, again, a lot of work to keep replacing clients, which is probably why if it isn’t this guy that can grow very quickly. There’s a bunch of reasons you probably you could be using.
But you know, if you’re thinking you’re you’re stuck and you can’t grow. Maybe that’s not actually how you win the business in the first place, it might issue whether you keep them?
Samantha Riley (07:26):
Absolutely. Well, we’ve talked a lot about why this topic is important. Let’s talk about what you can actually do. Because that’s what we’re here to do say there are some things that you can put in place to decrease the churn or the other flip side, increase your customer retention. I’m going to leave the most important one to last.
Because I think that this is one that’s very rarely talked about. So let’s start with some other things first, and I think the first one is sort of regular check ins. There’s different ways that you can do this.
Definitely have them automated in your CRM is a great way to to start this process off. This is definitely your area of expertise. Tim,
Tim Hyde (08:13):
what can you do it completely automated? Yeah, the text message or the email says, Hey, how’s it going? Huh? What could be a reminder to you to check in? We can like that as well. Yeah. So
Samantha Riley (08:26):
it could be a reminder to say, Hey, Sam, you need to check in with these clients this week. And you could manually text them or manually email them, or it could be an automated email text that goes directly to the client.
I get that. Right. That’s what you meant. You did indeed. Excellent. What are some other ways that or some other strategies that we can put in place to keep client
Tim Hyde (08:48):
I reckon one of the easiest one is just have a longer contract. Right? I think in the coaching consulting world, we say, particularly if you’ve got course material, and you know, there’s, there’s a real shift, okay, obviously, because it creates massive leverage for you.
But again, here’s my online course, here’s my online course go into my online course. And your online course, it’s six weeks, eight weeks, 10 weeks, 12 weeks, whatever, and someone goes through it, and then there’s nothing else beyond that.
I know, both you and I are massive fans of kind of a hybrid business model, where you have some online course material and tools and some coaching and consulting, which is sort of ongoing, but immediately if you make your course longer, and so maybe delivered that material over 12 months or two years, you’re giving someone a roadmap to where you want to go over a longer period of time.
So that immediately improves your retention because you’ve got more stuff. Okay, so show someone the roadmap. And if you’ve got that eight week course, well make it really clear Either this is just a foundational piece. And then that week nine, we move you on to this thing. Yeah. And this is essential if you want to the next thing.
Samantha Riley (10:11):
You got a real ascension ladder. Yeah, something I want to bring in on top of this is have a think about where your clients or customers are tripping or falling down or slowing down or getting stopped hitting roadblocks.
And what can you do to bring into your business model something that helps them to achieve that. So if you find that you’re teaching them a strategy, and they’re not implementing, what can you do to help them implement that?
Or what can you do to personalize something along the way, you can put things into place so that they don’t leave. This is how the genies came into effect.
Tim Hyde (10:53):
You’re in the right, Sam, looking at where people fall out, or why they fall out, right? ask people why they’re leaving, right look at, you know, measure the steps. And you know, people think marketing is just like, build a website and put a pretty brand on it.
And, you know, run some Facebook ads, and that’s my thing, but marketing is equally measuring your client retention, and how do we turn someone from, you know, a purchaser of my product or a raving fan of my product? That’s that’s marketing as well.
And we need to measure the what we’re doing in this space and seeing does it actually make a difference? On my retention, actually just pulled some stats out of HubSpot, which I’ve got some some really good stuff on here.
Insurance has a massive retention rate at 4%. Why? Wow. Because it just makes stuff easy. Banks have a great retention rate. Right? Because I just get used to detect my card and going and changing banks as is difficult ever tried to change
Samantha Riley (11:53):
your account and have to change all your memberships and your payments. And yeah.
Tim Hyde (12:01):
Exactly. You know, customer retention can also be making it hard to move away to something else.
Samantha Riley (12:06):
Let’s not take that model on let’s not do
Tim Hyde (12:09):
but here’s an interesting stat for you on the lowest one that I’ve got here on the hub’s education technology. 4%. Retention. Oh, interesting. Right media 25% retention, right SAS 35% retention software as a service.
Right? Why? Probably because we’re not getting people into the habit of using it. Right. So think about your thing, right? Are you tracking whether people show up to your program? Right?
Are they logging into your course, if they’re not looking at why not? Okay, maybe reach out and saying, Hey, you find it difficult to log in, I noticed you haven’t logged in for two weeks. If you don’t do those kinds of things, and measure what people are doing, they’ll just disappear. And you’ll find you have that low customer retention.
Samantha Riley (13:04):
I think that creating a community is another really great way to keep customer retention high when they’re connected with other humans, within a community, that people that are going on the same journey.
Because when you’ve got the support of someone else that really understands and empathizes with what you’ve going through, it creates a very tight bond. And if you can create that community around around your clients, even if you work with them one on one, it can be a really great retention strategy.
Tim Hyde (13:38):
Absolutely true. To him, I think Episode Two around, you know, as humans were primarily geared to want association with people going through the same stuff as us. And if you can create that bond, that these people are also experiencing the same things and going through the same things.
You know, they’ll feel appreciated, they’ll feel understood. And that’s way better than any sort of pricing or discounting or, or anything in terms of creating that loyalty to what it is that you do. Absolutely,
Samantha Riley (14:09):
because that loyalty comes from the transformation. That’s what we’re here to do to how to transform.
Now I mentioned the the one thing that I think is mostly overlooked in client retention, and I don’t hear very many people talking about this, but this I think is even more valuable than all of those things together.
Even though we do all of those things. But this is onboarding and onboarding for client retention is so important, because right from the beginning of your fiscal contract, you’re setting clear expectations in this is what you can expect from me.
And this is what I expect from you. Things like I expect you can expect for For me that you know that I’ll be delivering x y Zed strategies, I will be doing this I’ll be, you know, providing this.
But more importantly from the other side, what I can expect from you is that you show up consistently things like when you’ve got a question, ask. And the and this is setting up the expectation of, you need to show up and not hide Hunter a rock.
And when you’re setting that expectation upfront, that client is more likely to show up. And we all know that the clients that show up are more likely to stay.
Tim Hyde (15:35):
Yeah, I think that’s archery. Sam, I, one of the exercises I do with my clients in my way, sort of mapping their customer journey, and I know, you do a very similar process and yours is that people are going through this emotional range as they move through your business.
You know, as much as we like to think we’re all robots me we function without in the absence of emotion. When we’re making decisions. That is not the case. We’re emotional. We’re emotional creatures. Now. So when we first discover, you know, your business, we’re going to we want, you know, what we’re trying to manufacture with our marketing is an emotion.
Right? So it might be curiosity, the first time I see you, it’s like, what is that? That’s typically the first time we create awareness. We want to create curiosity, right? So your headlines and your copy and content and images all need to evoke curiosity. Right?
Then as we move people through joining, we need to create hope. It’s like, I’ve got that problem. And you seem to have the solution for me that I’ve been searching for, for a long time.
Okay, when we get to this onboarding stage, someone’s just outlaid, potentially, a big chunk of cash for you. What’s the emotion, they’re feeling they’re feeling? Have I made the right decision?
Samantha Riley (16:57):
Right? They’re excited and scared all at the same time, and
Tim Hyde (17:02):
excited and scared all at the same time I go on, right. So they’re probably feeling even more excited. They’re probably feeling uncertain. Right and unsure if they’ve made the right decision. It’s what we call buyer’s remorse.
What we need to do with our onboarding stage is take that uncertainty and fear and turn that into excitement and optimism. So you’re right. If you don’t create an onboarding experience, you’re gonna leave people in this position of fear and uncertainty, if they’ve made the right choice. And our onboarding experience has to change that to excitement and optimism again,
Samantha Riley (17:39):
and certainty.
Tim Hyde (17:41):
Okay, flipping that quickly. certainty. Yeah, totally.
Samantha Riley (17:43):
Yep. Just knowing, okay, this is where I’m at, this is what’s going to happen next. This is what I can expect. This is what needs to be done. All of a sudden, you’re taking away that, that fear of, oh, I’m feeling like, I don’t know what’s happening.
It’s that out of control, overwhelmed feeling. And we’re containing all of that going notes. All right. We’ve got you. We’ve got your back. This is what’s happening.
Tim Hyde (18:07):
Yeah. I’m curious what’s something you think is really cool about your onboarding experience? How did you go, I just love doing this. Because it just makes a difference every time. What
Samantha Riley (18:20):
I love about our onboarding, and our clients, often a bit like, oh, like in a bit of shock when we go through it, is that we say we’re gonna we give them a long list. So there’s a, you know, we promise to do this, and this is what we expect from you.
And the outside is we’ve got all these promises. It’s a very, very, very long list. Like it’s showing, we’ve got your back, this is what you can expect from us. And I think that it’s something that they’ve not normally come across.
And they normally, you know, however, oh, that’s not what I was expecting. Oh, I don’t have to worry any more, because you’ve got my back. And then when we flip to the other side, and say, we’ve only got three things that we, you know, we require from you. And I think that that just gives them that, that space to go not, they’ve got me.
So it’s not anything specific. It’s just that feeling. And it’s that feeling that we get every single time that we onboard a new client. Hmm, they’ve got they’ve got my back. I feel okay. Yeah,
Tim Hyde (19:22):
I do love this idea of asking your client for commitment and onboarding as well, not just a commitment of cash, right that they’ve made. And here’s what I promise for the cache. There’s this other relationship, where, you know, if we work together, we’ll get your result not.
If we do the work and you have to do nothing, you will get your the result. And I one of the things I do in our onboarding experiences, I actually tell my client what makes him a client.
Samantha Riley (19:50):
Oh, nice, because everyone wants to be an a client, right? You
Tim Hyde (19:55):
know, so this is what it looks like when you’re a D client for us. And this is what looks like when you’re in a client for us. Oh, Oh, nice one. Okay, the other thing that I’ve started to do, which I find really effective, is to kind of outline the process of what to do if things are not meeting your
Samantha Riley (20:14):
expectations. Yes, we do the same thing.
Tim Hyde (20:17):
If it’s not working for you, this is how we resolve things that’s not working for you. This is a process we’ll go through. And I think, again, that onboarding is so much about setting expectations of what’s going to happen, didn’t hear.
But you also need to kind of just refreshed and say, what if it doesn’t quite work out the way you think it’s working out? Or on either side, we’re unhappy? This is what we’re going to have. This is what’s gonna happen. Yeah,
Samantha Riley (20:40):
I like that. You mentioned that that is something that we say, if we do something to upset you, or that doesn’t meet your expectations, please tell us so that we can make it right.
Tim Hyde (20:52):
Yeah, and vice versa. Love it. Because if you do stuff that’s not working for us, this is the process we’ll get we’ll take you through. Yeah,
Samantha Riley (20:59):
I really love this. I think this is such a valuable topic. Because it’s like we mentioned right at the beginning, it’s such an overlooked reason as to why you’re possibly unable to grow your business.
A lot of people, like we said, they talk about lead generation, they talk about sales. But if you could just increase your customer retention, and add new clients, like your business will explode.
Tim Hyde (21:27):
Well, you don’t even have to have much right now.
Samantha Riley (21:31):
And you right, it doesn’t even need to explode. Right? Just adding?
Tim Hyde (21:34):
That’s right. I don’t even know you’re trying to do implants. I think that goes without saying the chance of achieving 100% retention, probably not really possible is not really likely. Okay.
Not likely aren’t because there’s all sorts of circumstances outside of your control, might move away might close your business might get to a point where you can no longer serve them and you want to encourage them to move on to the next, the next person.
And I think that’s an important thing we need to keep in mind as well, Sam, but, you know, just on there’s some studies out of Harvard Business School that sort of suggests that if you can enrich in increase just a 5% increase in customer retention would be between 25 to 95% increase in your bottom line profits.
Samantha Riley (22:25):
Just run those numbers that can be very exciting
Tim Hyde (22:30):
for us to get 5% increase in customer retention.
Samantha Riley (22:35):
Love it. Great topic, Tim. I’ve really enjoyed unpacking this with you. This is a topic that I really love. I know it’s a topic that you really love to. If you’ve listened to this episode, and you’ve got any AR has something really stood out to you or you’ve got any questions and you would like us to dive deeper in another episode, please reach out to us on socials. You can find all the links in the show notes wherever you’re listening to this episode.
Thanks so much for joining us for another episode and we’ll catch you all next week for another episode of Influence by Design.
Samantha Riley Outro
Thanks for joining me for this episode of the Influence By Design podcast. If you want more head over to influencebydesignpodcast.com for the show notes and links to today’s gifts and sponsors. And if you’re looking to connect with other experts who are growing and scaling their business to join us in the coaches, thought leaders, and changemakers community on Facebook, the links are waiting for you over at influencebydesignpodcast.com
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