Easy Come, Easy Go

This is a longtime saying of my business partner Charles Chase. Incidentally, I’ve been hounding him to start a blog, until then I’ll have to steal some of his great ides. The basic concept here is that there is a direct correlation between the time and effort it takes to bring a customer on board to the likelihood they will remain a customer. In other words, the easier it is to obtain a customer, the more likely they will leave. This isn’t always true, but we have seen it demonstrated more than a few times. Since we can’t ignore the easy guys and spend all our time brining in the whales, we have to figure out a balance. The trick to overcoming this circumstance is two-fold.

First, we have develop a sales infrastructure that encourages long term client development and second we have to build a client services network that nourishes existing clients. We do both, but we don’t do it perfectly. This is a big area of focus for the remainder of 2006. We know how to get clients. We know how to service them. Now we need to keep the existing clients happy and continuing to find value in our services. Achieving that gives us freedom to work on the bigger, longer sales cycle deals.