Summary: Building and strengthening client relationships is critical. Some people feel like they can get more attention from a salesperson calling than they get at home because maybe they feel like this person's listening, paying attention and then asking about it.<br> <br> <br> <br> David: Hi, and welcome to the podcast. In today's episode, co-host Jay McFarland and I will be discussing strengthening client relationships. Welcome back.<br> <br> <br> <br> Jay: Hey, David, once again. It's great to be here and I think that this is another really, really important topic. The key word for me is relationships. I think that oftentimes you see people with a business model who want to "turn 'em and burn 'em," so to speak, and they don't think about that word, relationships and how important it is.<br> <br> David: Yeah. And very often, even if they don't intend to do it, the tendency among many salespeople is to get in there, make the sale, move on, get to the next one, get to the next one, get to the next one. And when it happens this way, it's very difficult to really maximize the value of those relationships in terms of dollars, but also just in terms of the relationship itself.<br> <br> When you do that, when you just get in there, you sell something and then you move on to the next one, you're not really building and nurturing a relationship, which is critical if you don't want to have to constantly replace the clients that you're losing because you're not maintaining those relationships in the first place.<br> <br> Jay: Yeah, absolutely. And the other thing is that there is for most companies a customer acquisition cost. And so if you've already paid that cost to get that customer, well, that goes away if you can build a relationship and they continue to use you. That to me is just such an important approach.<br> <br> If you're just doing it one at a time, you're going to pay that cost every single time, and it's going to lower your profit margins.<br> <br> David: I completely agree, and people talk about that sort of thing all the time. We all know that it costs a whole lot less to resell an existing customer than it does to find and sell a new customer.<br> <br> We all know it intellectually, but it is rarely practiced as well as it could be and should be within most businesses. You know, an analogy that helped me a lot was when I realized that when we're building a client base, it's a little like building a brick wall. You know, you get that first brick in place and then you get the next brick in place and the next brick in place, right?<br> <br> So your first year in business, you've got this sort of layer of bricks. These are each of the initial customers that you brought in. And then, your second year in business, if you're able to maintain all the customers you brought in the first time, then you can add on, you can layer in another layer of bricks, another layer of customers, and then your third year you can build in a third level and you can continue to grow it like that.<br> <br> And eventually you've got this great monolith of exceptional clients who continue to pay you money on an ongoing basis. But the problem is that we are not able to retain those customers. You get a crack in that, one of the bricks disappears from the first level, then your second year in business, you're starting out by plugging the holes.<br> <br> You have to replace those missing customers. And so everything takes a lot longer. You're essentially reconstructing your customer base, and a lot of it is unnecessary if we would just focus on strengthening and maintaining those client relationships.<br> <br> Jay: Yeah, and there's several ways to do that, right?<br> <br> Phone calls, emails, drip campaigns from your customer management system. There's a lot of ways to do that. But I got to tell you, you know, as somebody who's on the phone all day long doing sales,
