Editor's Note: If you missed Dave Fellman's webinar in February about navigating away from price during the sales cycle, you missed a good one! But you can watch the recording by logging into the APDSP Members Center and finding the webinar on the left side under the Member Tools tab.
By Dave Fellman
This is the third and final installment in my little series on The Top 3 Ways Printers Lose Customers. So far, we’ve talked about Quality Failures and Service Failures. Now it’s time to discuss the biggest culprit of them all.
Contact Failures
The most popular way to lose a customer, it seems, is to lose touch with them. Industry-specific research indicates that only about 10% of all customer loss is due to quality failures, and only another 10% is due to service failures. The research indicates that 60% of all customer loss comes from simply losing touch. (To complete the picture, 15% of the people who change printing suppliers say they do so because they’ve found “better” pricing, and another 5% change for a variety of miscellaneous reasons.)
How do you keep from losing touch with your customers? The best strategy is to establish some interval that you will simply never let go by without either you hearing from them, or them hearing from you.
I work with my clients to build a “contact calendar” which sets the intervals at either 1 week, 2 weeks, 4 weeks or 8 weeks. The first step is to assign the appropriate interval to each customer. The second step is to lay that all out visually on the contact calendar. The third step is to transfer the whole interval plan into a CRM like Salesforce or ACT. The fourth step is to pay attention to when you’re hearing from people, and when the interval reminder comes around, if they haven’t called you or come in to see you within the designated time period, you call them or go to see them!
Implementation
If I were you, I would make someone in my organization responsible for every single one of my customers. With an outside salesperson, that would certainly mean holding that person responsible for maintaining interval contact with every one of his/her customers. How about the frequent “walk-in” customers and house accounts? I would assign each of them to somebody—probably a CSR, possibly a DTP/Design employee, and for a customer of sufficient importance, I’d make myself responsible!
If you’re like most of the large format printers I work with, you have a whole bunch of “inactives” on your customers list. They’ve bought from you in the past, but they’re not buying from you right now. Let’s stop and think about how people like this became inactive?
One possibility is that they don’t buy your products or services anymore, possibly because they’re not in business anymore. If that’s the case, you’re blameless, but it’s still better to know than to not know. The only other possibility is that you lost their business, either because of quality failure, service failure or contact failure. It may be too late to do anything about those failures, but it’s not too late to try to prevent them from happening with your current active customers!
Dave Fellman is the president of David Fellman & Associates, Cary, NC, a sales and marketing consulting firm serving numerous segments of the graphic arts industry. Contact Dave by phone at 919-363-4068 or by e-mail at dmf@davefellman.com. Visit his website at www.davefellman.com.