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Winning Genuine Quality Clients

Mike PaganMike Pagan (pictured, right) presented his workshop “Remove the rubbish and win genuine quality clients” to members of The Academy for Chief Executives experiential business learning® groups this month. Mike’s belief is that many businesses spend too much time with the wrong clients either because we’re not brave enough to let them go or because we’re too dependant upon their low profit margin business or because we obsess over turnover not profit.

Mike introduced members of The Academy’s ECHG Programme to the ‘Premium Client Calculator’TM . We learnt how to increase the number of criteria when considering the ‘quality’ of our clients. This enabled us to understand more fully who the stars were, who needed to be removed from the portfolio, and who should be nurtured and given more attention.

Key take-away points included:

  1. Relationships are the most important factor in CRM
  2. Most clients leave because they feel ‘unloved’
  3. Value, number and frequency of purchase matter in defining ‘good’ customers but so do a host of other factors such as payment terms!
  4. To ensure continuity of contact know your key contact AND who they work for / with and who works for them.
  5. By identifying our ‘Premium’ clients we can challenge conventional marketing approaches and drastically reduce the number of marketing activities attempted. By doing this we immediately save costs and can focus the right amount of time, effort and resource on the remaining marketing activities.
  6. By creating mutual respect amongst our clients, the desire to work together and the ability to generate a win-win profitable environment for both we inevitably achieve long term valuable client relationships.

Jane HuntAll in all, a really useful tool to objectively evaluate customers, suppliers, competitors, staff etc. using criteria identified by the business itself.
Jane Hunt,
Chairman, Academy Group ECHG 01

The Academy for Chief Executives, a leading provider of experiential business learning® facilitates peer groups of CEOs and Managing Directors who meet together every month to network and take full advantage of experiential learning. To hear great speakers like this every month and engage in The Board You Could Never Afford®, or to find a local group near you, visit www.chiefexecutive.com.

One Comment

  1. Sarah & Tim says:

    Great concepts. I agree, that sometimes businesses don’t let them go, even when it would be beneficial for both parties to do so. I read an article in Monetary Intelligence Magazine recently, http://monetaryintel.com, that discussed focusing on the right clientel and how to target the affluent who have up to 90% dispensible income. Thanks for sharing.

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