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I would like to share a disturbing little secret with you. Almost 70% of the people you do face-to-face business with will never speak to you again.

It's not that they didn't like you or get value from your services. It's simply that they just don't care. They've got other things on their mind: the kids need new clothes, the toilet needs repairing and the car's making that strange knocking sound again. And, of course, there is that big report due tomorrow.

These are the things that take up your customer's bandwidth. They haven't thought about you since you last spoke to them weeks ago.

But why wouldn't they think about you? Didn't that last marketing campaign get great feedback?

As the available research suggests, it's not that they don't like you; rather, they have simply forgotten you. By the way, the research I read indicated that, in general, only about 8% of customers would be dissatisfied with the product or service they received.

Let me illustrate. I recently worked with a company that has served over 3,000 clients in the past three years. In that time, it has never sent out a card, email or direct mail piece communicating with past customers. Yet the company still receives a third of its new business from referrals.

So why isn't the company not reminding happy, satisfied customers that it is still around and looking to make happier, more satisfied customers?

The answer is simply that management is too busy managing the day-to-day business to have time to create new marketing pieces. Instead, the company spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on expensive, shotgun-style advertising to get the attention of potential new customers.

In other words, it's much easier in their view to call up the Yellow Pages and place a year of ads than it is to create a meaningful relationship campaign. It's true: relationship-building campaigns take time and energy—something we often don't have much of once the daily workload has been taken care of.

In this company, however, a campaign was conceived that would thank the 3,000 past customers for their business and remind them that referrals had been the key to the company's success. The campaign also provided each past customer with both offline and online tools to pass on consistent referrals. At the same time, the company reduced its print ad placements to ensure that results were not overshadowed by alternate lead generators.

The result? The company was able to triple revenues in 12 months, attributable almost entirely to referrals.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Richard Banfield is a business development specialist with a focus on growing profits for early- to mid-stage global technology companies. Reach him at richard@freshtilledideas.com.