Managing your customer relations through simple yet effective marketing tactics...

When a business is small - and has just a few customers, the business is in the luxurious position of being able to treat every customer differently. However, as the business grows and acquires more customers, it becomes difficult to make a profit at the same time as providing such a highly personalised service.

Yet regardless of how big you've grown and how many hundreds of customers you may have. It's important to remember that customers will expect to be 'heard' and treated as individuals.

Starting off on the right foot

For many accounting practices rare is the process of 'personalised customer engagement'. And whilst most practices would protest this - stating that they hold a formal engagement meeting with clients, and then provide a formal 'letter of engagement' stating the terms of the relationship, this is not personalised customer engagement.

For most practices, they are merely undertaking the process of 'selling' the services they offer - rather than subtly turning the situation into a 'client need investigation'. It's all a matter of positioning. Isn't it better to start a relationship by uncovering the needs of your client - and then delivering the solutions. After all, it may be that your customer doesn't really know what services they need, and it's certainly likely that they don't know or fully understand the total range of services you provide.

By simply engaging a client with a consultative approach to uncovering their need and providing solutions - the accountant wins on two accounts;

1) the client is appreciative of the level of service and feels that they've truly been treated as an individual whose needs are important. And

2) the accountant doesn't miss the opportunity for new business.

Building a relationship with each client is fundamental. Even though you are providing a similar service to similar clients - and many of their needs may be similar, you can't communicate with all of your clients in the same way.

Building such relationships involves a long-term commitment to nurturing your client base and dedicating the necessary resource to the cause. It's an enormous yet necessary task. Hence the phenomenal increase in software packages and customer relationship management gurus.

See how you score on these questions:

o Do you know who your good clients are? How do you know? Through analysis, or gut feeling? 
o Do you know who your bad clients are? 
o What activities do you do to nurture your good clients? 
o What are their needs? 
o Are you asking them what they want from you? 
o If so, how regularly? 
o Are you expending too much energy servicing bad clients? 
o How effective is your marketing activity? 
o Where are new clients coming from? 
o Why are good clients leaving? 
o How do you categorise your clients?

If you know all of the answers to these questions on an ongoing basis - then you are pretty much on top of managing and understanding the needs of your clients - if not, then let's take a look at how you can practice good customer relationship management.

Firstly, how do you define a 'good' client? The Pareto Principle states that 80% of your sales come from 20% of your customers. And therefore, that 20% of your client base are the 'good' clients. Now it may not be exactly 80/20 - in some cases it could be 90/10 and in others 60/40 - but there's definitely a case for doing some analysis and identifying which clients make up your 'good' client segment.

In fact, through customer analysis, if you make a list of all your existing and potential customers, broken down into categories representing turnover, chances are you'll end up with a client base split into three sectors:

o A small number of high volume customers. 
o A large number of medium volume customers. 
o An even larger number of low volume customers.

Use your database as a Customer Relationship Management Tool

On your database you can categorise your clients accordingly. Keeping an eye on client profitability is necessary to the health of any business. Segmenting your clients this way will also help you to prioritise your marketing activity.

Remember, a happy client will play a big role in encouraging peers, friends and family to use your services. It's likely your 'good' clients mix with other 'good' prospective clients. And given that the majority of new business generated within practices is through referral - then good customer relationship management is a necessary business objective

Your client database can help you prioritise, segment and target the specific clients you want to be communicating with - so that you are speaking to them as individuals.

Also, from a new business generation perspective, there may be other sectors of the potential market that you are interested in: 
o Hot prospects - ready to buy 
o Warm prospects - may buy if timing is right 
o Leads - potential customers that you know about vaguely, but not enough to put them into a particular category. 
o Suspects - potential customers you would like to have, but as yet have no contact with - let's call them 'dream clients'. 
o Cold prospects - simply will never buy

Looking at these five sectors, it becomes apparent that each sector requires a different approach. One shoe certainly doesn't fit all - and so mass marketing to these sectors, is unlikely to be effective. Also, do you want to be wasting resource marketing to those 'cold' prospects that will never buy from you?

Servicing your clients' needs, is only possible if you really get to know what it is they really want from you. Really getting to grips with the needs of your client base.

And then you have to record all those needs, buying habits, and have the ability to build a solid base of information about your customers and prospects - that you can tap into to help you to communicate with them on a one to one basis.

There's no excuse for not recording and using such valuable information to increase the impact of your marketing activity. There's no need to invest in expensive systems, you can simply develop your customer database so that it becomes the focal point for all your marketing activities, providing you with a means to apply tactics to nurture your clients and prospective clients.

In it's simplest form - effective marketing means that you have to identify the needs of your market and then provide a service to fulfil that need. Therefore, to achieve this, your firm needs to become highly customer orientated - with a clear focus on investigating and servicing your clients' needs.

In Practice

Start off on the right foot. When you engage a new client, ensure that you use the opportunity to investigate their needs, communicate the range of services you can provide - and deliver to them solutions to their specific need. Review client need on an ongoing basis. Don't assume that nothing changes.

Analyse your client base and segment based on a similar need base. That way you can target your marketing activity effectively and your client feels like you are talking to them as an individual. Treat your prospective clients as you would your client base. Analyse the status of your prospect - hot, warm, cold etc - and target your marketing activity effectively. Use your database as a simple customer relationship tool - enabling you to segment customers and target your marketing campaigns effectively.