Almost every business is focused on growing sales. And many business invest significant time, effort and money on growing sales while ignoring the 1,500 pound elephant in the room. How can we keep more of our clients and in fact get them to buy more from us.

Yes, for many business, sales growth of 5%, 10% or more could be obtained by doing a better job marketing to your current clients! How do you market to your current clients? Perhaps you send or drop off printed marketing materials, leave a promotional product with them, enclose a marketing flyer with an invoice. But many business don’t even do these basic things.

Instead, businesses create elaborate plans to spend thousands of dollars on sales and marketing campaigns to convince strangers that they should start doing business with us. That doesn’t make sense. It is well-studied that the cost of getting a stranger to do business with a company cost multiples more than getting a current or past customer to make an additional purchase. And the time it takes to get action is much longer with a stranger.

So what should you do? First, you need to be able to track/monitor what the opportunities are with your current customers. What products or services are the low hanging fruit for your business? What is the sales potential in terms of dollar volume? This is important so that you can ensure that your marketing and sales efforts can/will produce an adequate ROI. 

Another reason that this is very important…every product or service you are not selling one of your clients is a product or service they are buying at a competitor. Which means your ineffectiveness to sell all your services is opening the door to introduce them to your competition!