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Working With Your Client Base Part 1

The Importance of Client Retention

Having sweated blood to get Billy as a client you really, really need to prevent others from poaching him.

As an independent Financial Adviser the key to this is to make sure Billy likes you on a personal level.  Remember Guerrilla Marketing, do the things that the big companies can’t do.  In the business sense you might on occasions feel small and insignificant but you have a massive advantage over The Abbey or Money Supermarket.  You’re a real person, and to you Billy is a real person, not just account : 3098276/28922/AB/278 – C (why do they always insist on so many numbers when there are only about 61,000,000 people in the UK, is it some kind of my customer base is bigger than yours thing?).  I digress a little here but I’m sure you get the point, make it a rule to always treat the customer as “Billy” and not just a customer, and already you’re streets ahead of the game.

On this same point being professional doesn’t necessarily mean being vanilla, you need to make a human connection with Billy, don’t be afraid to use humour or a bit of gentle leg pulling.  Obviously you have to use a bit of judgement/common sense here, you wouldn’t just walk in, sit down and say “right big nose let’s get you sorted out” but if the house is nice then a quick “it must cost some money to keep a house like this” or if there’s a dinghy in the drive “you’re the first customer I’ve had with a yacht” very rarely goes amiss, the “right big nose let’s get you sorted” can wait until the second visit; only joking!

So if we assume that part of the mission is now accomplished, Billy now thinks of you as a friend. The next important point to remember is that as a friend Billy likes you to stay in touch.  One of the first things I would recommend is to send all of your clients a Christmas card every year.  Unless you have thousands of clients and can’t cajole or bribe someone to write the card and the envelope out for you, I would always recommend sending them a hand written card.  It needn’t cost a lot; as a broker I used to buy half decent cards just after Christmas to send the following year.  Of course I’m a skinflint, but it did mean my clients got a better quality card, and I know they appreciated it because most of them invariably sent me a card back, and you know they won’t send one back to Sainsbury’s or Next.

A tip here to big up your business is to make a Christmas graphic and message in a desk top publishing program and print it on one page of the card .  I can recommend Microsoft Publisher or even better Serif Pageplus as being cheap, easy to use and once you have the hang of them you can also use them to produce your own letter headings, business card designs, leaflets and advertising copy.

This is great now; Billy has already realised that you are a good friend of the family, and he will probably be wracked with guilt if he goes anywhere else for a loan or insurance.  So let’s do what we can to save Billy’s suffering.  He’s done his bit, now it’s up to us to do ours.  To save him feeling guilty about using somebody else’s services we need to make sure he doesn’t need to.

I can’t really emphasise this too strongly, Keep In Touch.  The Christmas card thing was great but we need to do more.  One adviser I spoke to used to send his clients a birthday card as well.  I personally never did this but his logic was that almost everyone gets loads of cards at Christmas, especially if they have kids.  Birthdays however are another matter, and especially if you’re into the second half of the great football match that is life.  I’ve been married for ages, have grown up kids, and I’m certainly not a hermit but I only get about six cards birthday on average.  In fact I even get excited about the card and voucher for a free cream cake I receive from Sainsbury’s, every year, so how much more thrilling would it be for Billy to get a hand written card from his financial adviser and personal friend?

Read Part 2 Here

Read Part 3 Here

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