Building and Maintaining Your Client Base

All organizations have clients. The reason that they have customers is because of the great marketing & sales team that the organization has. These are the heroes who got out there to the deep ocean and fish out customers who indirectly but definitely write our pay cheques.

No matter who the client is, be it a large organization with 10000+ employees or a small business of say 50 people, the ‘Client’ is finally a human. The reason why this was stated is to understand the way people think and work when it comes to buying a product or a solution.

Let’s deep dive at the 3 stages that are involved from the “Marketing & Sales Sell” to the “Final product delivery”

Stage 1: The Emotional Bond
A human being has to reach a height of emotional bonding and desire to buy something big. For example If you had to buy a car, you did for some point of time reach the peak of liking and desire for that particular car, to have actually bought it.

This is the same rule that applies to your clients. Your marketing and sales team has performed the role of getting your client to a level of desire and want for your product or solution, which resulted in a guaranteed sell.

Stage 2: The Buyers Regret
Once a product\solution is bought, it’s only a matter of time (i.e. anywhere from a day to two weeks) when your client enters the phase of ‘The Buyers Regret’. This is the phase where your client would start thinking that he could have got a better deal or a better product and start regretting the current purchase.

This is also the phase where your marketing and sales teams have moved out of the picture and it’s the client coordinator who is in charge to deliver what was promised. Imagine the scenario where your coordinator is not perfectly in sync with what has been promised and sold by the marketing team. This basically results in the recipe for disaster. The client being in the regret phase is further anguished and the regret seems more justified to him.

The Moral here is, always keep the stakeholders in the entire cycle in sync. The Client coordinator has to have a perfect knowledge transfer with the marketing team to understand what was exactly sold.

Stage 3: The Product Shipment
If things went perfectly fine in stage 2, then stage 3 is where you could potentially fall. If the marketing team promises the moon and the stars and what the development team can create is only water and soil, we both know what will the result will be.

The Moral here is, it’s better off to have a smaller satisfied customer base and grow steadily than to have a large one who is continuously breathing down your neck and threatening to break the deal. Your marketing team should know what is the potential of the development team is. They should only sell and promise what can be achieved by the development team by a realistic stretch.

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Copyright © Dennis D Maliekal 2009