Knowing that some clients are only looking to obtain a successful transaction and others value the fact that a solid relationship is established, is it worth investing in the former?
The answer is simple. NO.
The group of the first clients are those who take offers, promotions, short-term incentives, and thus go from supplier to supplier. If promotions are well understood, companies launch them to attract new customers, which will be profitable as these consumers continue to buy from us. Only in a medium-term business relationship, can we recover the costs of recruiting a client.
What are the best tools to identify the most valuable customers?
Nothing replaces the possibility of asking questions to the customer, but we can also analyze transactions: how much you bought from us in the past, age as a customer, frequency with which you buy, if you always buy in closeouts, if you always buy our special offers, what means of payment choose, history of complaints and claims, etc., etc. But there are things I want to know and I can only find out by asking. For that, we have the golden question. Imagine asking the client: "If miraculously starting tomorrow, you were to give your day one more hour, what would you use the 25 hour for?"
You will be amazed at the answers! With this single question, it is really possible to draw a fairly approximate profile of our client, the part of the information that we cannot collect by analyzing the transactional history.
However, there are many other cases of “golden question”. In the United States, there is a manufacturer of pet food that decided to develop relationships with its customers - it is worth clarifying that the customers are the owners of the pets. Instead of finding out how many puppies they had and their ages, he asked them as part of a loyalty program "Where does your pet sleep?". Those who sleep near the owner are a much more valuable customer than those who put their pets to sleep outside the house.
In this way, he continues to ask some other questions, which aims to allow the company to weigh "how much he wants his pet" and ultimately who are the most willing to spend a few extra pesos to buy Premium food.
What we have to try to establish is the specific value of the client that arises from determining and adding three types of values:
1. The real value, which comes from knowing how much you currently buy.
2. The future value, which starts from assuming how much this client could buy us if he continued being our client, taking statistics of average life and other issues such as discounts of a cut-off rate of the future values; and finally.
3. The strategic value of a client, and that is where I want to stop. This variable is never or very rarely taken into account by the companies that segment and differentiate the customer, and probably in many cases they are discarding the juice of the orange to keep only the seeds. A client may have a low real value and a not very tempting future value, but if we analyze the strategic value we could obtain an encouraging vision when it comes to retaining. What do i mean
Let's imagine that a bank customer has had a savings bank for five years in which he deposits his salary and only that. The bank earns a minuscule monthly income, which often does not even translate into profit, because the client generates permanent claims to the attention center. The bank can infer that the client has a very low real value and suspends any type of communication to this person, to ensure that they do not continue investing. What the bank overlooks is that the client has made inquiries in the last three months about personal loans and mortgage loans, because as she herself told the account executive, she is about to get married. In fact, he took his future wife to open an account with the same bank and thus concentrate their income.All this information is what I call: "strategic value of a client". It is all that information, which we do not learn to collect or store and which is indicating to us that Mr. José García can advance several positions in ourLeaderboard, that is, maybe we should continue investing in it for a longer period.
On the other hand, we must make it clear that the fact of having more valuable clients than others, does not mean in any way that we are going to mistreat any client.
We have to know who is who in our portfolio, regardless of whether we are a law firm with twenty clients or a supermarket with fifty thousand. We must determine in all cases who is the best to retain them, who has development potential, who generates losses to avoid spending on them.
We can have, depending on the business in which we are, two, three or up to twenty types of clients to plan distinctive commercial actions with each of them and always depending on the profit that each contributes, since ultimately, it is only about be profitable.
