What’s ? This is THE stephane ANDRE ! I watched an Olivier Roland’s video  and I learned good stuff.

The majority of entrepreneurs all make the same mistake and if you understand this mistake, you can have the advantage over them. This is because theses entrepreneurs are focused on acquiring new clients. For example an entrepreneur who want to increase the client base by 20% per year, he/she will say to himself/herself : « OK, I have to find 20% more new clients per year ». And you know what ? This reasoning is wrong.

I’ll explain why it’s wrong. In this reasoning, these entrepreneurs don’t take in account attrition. Attrition is the clients who no longer do business with the entrepreneur. Look, if an entrepreneur has an attrition of 10% per year, which means that 10% of the clients that the entrepreneur has convinced, stop using his/her products/services. Now, if this entrepreneur wants to increase the client base by 20% per year, he/she must actually find 30% more clients per year.

You see the problem. To improve the situation, it’s necessary to know the 3 category of clients who stop using your product or service (a client who leaves the company).

Category 1

This the easier category to deduce, it’s the client who is not happy. This client liked your product/service for a while, something didn’t go well and this client decided to stop using your product/service. What is important to know is that these clients will leave and never buy a product/service in your company without ever explaining why. That’s why I recommend you to put a system to ask those client who leave, the reasons. You can ask this type of question : « Is there a problem ? If yes, can you describe it to us ? ».

Clients in this category leave your company because there was something wrong with the product/service and often these are things that are very easy to repair. It’s possible that these are legitimate problems that are easy to solve, in this case, repair it very quickly. You can use a sentence like : « Yes, it’s our fault and we solved the problem, sorry. To be forgiven, we give you a  ?_ ? % discount on the next product/service you buy. This is a simple way to win back some of those clients who would otherwise be gone forever.

Sometimes, you’ll have clients who want while paying as little as possible and who are never happy. In this case, let these clients go because your business is much better without these people.

Category 2

This is the category whose client situation evolved. This means that at some point in their lives these clients needed your product/service and today they’re in a different situation. It’s not that these clients don’t like you product/service anymore, it’s just that they no longer need to use it.

For example, you sell a product/service for pregnant women. Once women have given birth, they’re automatically no longer clients. It’s impossible to keep those clients. But if these clients were happy with the product/service, you can ask them : « OK, now that you no longer need to use our product/service, can you share our product/service with someone do you know and we will offer her a welcome gift, because this person comes because of you ? ».

In this type of industry, clients use a product/service for a limited time so this little trick make it easy to have new clients.

Category 3

This is the category of clients who used your product/service for a while and have forgotten you. It hurt your ego but we all have billions of things to do. We have already used a good product/service and after a while, forget it. For example, I have a Tumblr‘s account. 2 years ago, I often went on Tumblr and for 1 year, I stopped to use it. For my blog, I automated a process to share a link of each article I publish on my blog to Tumblr. 2-3 weeks ago, I noticed on one of my emails that there were several new people everyday following me on my Tumblr account. Seeing this , I decided to use Tumblr more often.

Sometimes these are cases where you used a product/service for a while and for 1 year, you no longer use this product/service. Once, by chance, you see the ads of a competitor and you will buy from the competitor. You have completely forgotten that there are 1-2 years ago, you used a product/service that did the same thing.

For clients in this category, it’s necessary that you identify them to recontact them as soon as possible by offering them a gift (a discount, an invitation to an event, etc).

Conclusion

By focusing on these 3 clients categories and by setting up actions that I shared with you, you’ll be able to decrease your company’s attrition. With that you’ll have an advantage over your competitors who focus only on having new clients.

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-Steph