Client Retention: Be Yourself & Coach the Right People

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right.

Well, so many things there just I want to touch on to highlight that resonate with me.

The first off that you led with, the importance of retention.

I don't know why this number is sticking in my head and whether it's true or not, but that the cost of acquiring or retaining, sorry, the cost of acquiring a new customer is something on the order of eight times more expensive than retaining the customer that you have.

And a lot of the sales mindset that I've been working on is thinking about sales as coaching.

in the sense that i'm helping somebody make a decision faster and that i'm i'm always instead of always be closing i'm always be coaching it's kind of become my mantra lately um and if we think about retaining a client or the the choice a client makes every month to keep their subscription going you are effectively always selling.

Your relationship is always influencing a decision for them to either buy your service again next month or not.

And you may not think about it consciously that way, but effectively that's what's happening.

And every interaction that you have as you're building and maintaining that relationship is a factor in whether they choose to continue your service.

To me, I don't see a difference between retention and selling a new client when you boil it down.

It's just a much less expensive version and a much less riskier version because your probability of retaining an existing client is much higher than retaining the new client.

That resonates with me.

What I love about what you're talking about and what I was really hoping we would get from your discussion is that John talked about the business perspective of it, but what you've described to me sounds more like how you internalize it personally thinking about who you are, who you want to work with, and how to actually build rapport with the people that you do want to work with as a means of improving their client experience.

He talks about setting expectations and meeting them, but your perspective is really focused, it seems like, on aligning who you are with who your clients are.

Yeah, because if you try to force two people together who just aren't a good match, right off the bat, I can tell you they're not going to last in three months.

But rather, if you can do that filtering early on, it just increases the likelihood that someone signing with you is now going to be working with you in the long term.

And I'm just, again, a big fan of if I can refer out, tell someone, go to this exact coach, and the way that almost instantly becomes a referral from them.

Because if someone's coming to me, they're usually already in the gym in some format.

They know something of powerlifting and strongman or general strength training.

So they're probably in an environment where they're going to meet people who are fitting my niche, fitting my culture, my type.

And that person who I turned away and recommended go somewhere else is that referral point because I did my job and prioritized the client.

I coached them to, hey, I'm not the right decision for you.

Here's two other options.

And so, yeah, I really like that idea of it is still just coaching the whole time, just different stages of it.