Nurturing Your Clients and Contacts to Drive New Revenue

As trailblazers in lead development, market research and prospecting services, one thing the team at ML hears regularly when speaking with prospective clients is a tendency for companies to neglect mining their existing client base for new revenue opportunities, and not being proactive enough in maintaining contact with former clients or lost opportunities.  

At ML, we coach our clients to be systematic in their outreach to clients, former clients and lost prospects. We have learned (from our own success as well as applying this approach for our clients) that you can dramatically increase revenue by capitalizing on opportunities you didn’t realize exist within current and previous clients and prospects.  

Our previous blog “Building Trust Through Account based selling (ABS)” explained how an ABS methodology removes friction from the selling process to build trust and win new clients. We covered the importance of Ideal Client Profiles and understanding how value propositions apply to their needs to help you identify the right accounts to target. We shared how to maintain a one-way dialogue with relevant, personalized messaging to engage those prospects, and how an aligned, skilled team and the right tools leveraged effectively all play a part in turning prospects into clients. 

But what about your existing clients, and former clients and prospects? (At ML we call them “FANS”… an acronym for Former Account, New Success.) If you are not maintaining a dialogue with these accounts to earn and grow their trust, you are likely missing out on a goldmine of opportunity. 

In this blog, we will share our Top 4 Best Practices for Nurturing Your Clients and FANS to create new revenue, and we will discuss the client-centric concept of the  HubSpot Flywheel and how it uses the momentum of happy clients and contacts to drive referrals and repeat sales.   

The HubSpot Flywheel and How it Aligns Your Success with Your Clients’ Success 

The HubSpot Flywheel model explains the momentum gained when you align your entire organization around delivering a remarkable client experience. How fast it spins and how much value it delivers is impacted by a number of factors. Follow the link to learn more about how this works.  
 
ML is a HubSpot Platinum Partner and keen proponent of the Flywheel model. Both of our companies share a “client first” attitude. Embracing a client-centric corporate philosophy will align your success with your clients’, to create delight, loyalty, and trust.  

At ML we employ a personalized nurturing process to stay connected and help create the remarkable client experience the Flywheel espouses. Our process is very similar to our overall ABS methodology but personalized to this unique audience of buyers who have familiarity already with our brand.  

Once you have invested in the foundational strategy, processes and tools, the execution is quite simple, low cost… and effective. 

Top 4 Best Practices for Nurturing Your Client Advocates and FANS 

Here are the Top 4 strategies we use to nurture our clients and former contacts to create new revenue sources:   

1. Maintain a Regular One-Way Dialogue. Remember that ICP and Value Proposition homework you did? Use it to create a well thought out content strategy that puts your message in front of the prospect in language they find relatable. Creating relevant content is about understanding what keeps your clients up at night and addressing those concerns as they relate to how you can help. Trust is created by ensuring the content is focused on their need, not sales literature that is all about you. Deliver it in a variety of forms like emails, newsletters and videos. Mix it up! 
2. Keep Your Prospecting List Clean. This means identifying the right decision makers and influencers at the organizations that fall within your addressable market. A client once gave us their entire contact list which they assumed covered their target market. Through our outreach we found that 60% of the contacts on their list were no longer valid (had left the company, were no longer in a decision-making role, etc.). This meant that 60% of their previous marketing outreach had been wasted on the wrong contacts. We fixed that by cleaning up their list and they saw response rates to their marketing outreach rise dramatically. 
3. Track Responses to Your Outreach. Here again we are hyping the importance of technology. Make sure you are tracking reactions including who is opening your emails, downloading content, and registering for your webinars. By using technology like HubSpot’s CRM, you can keep this process simple or get very sophisticated in how you score reactions. The point is, this is invaluable data that tells you when an individual is giving off buying signals (as true for your prospects as for your FANS), serving as an indication that it is time for a follow up call. Also monitor what your audience is reacting to in order to gauge their motivations and interests (and of course whether your message is resonating).   
4. Be Proactive and Persistent with Your Follow-up.  Using insights from content reaction and social media activity, periodically reach out to your FANS when you have a new story to tell or when you notice something in their life has changed, or when they give off a buying signal as mentioned in point 3 above. 

Always approach the conversation with a solution to one of their challenges.   

It takes deliberate action to keep your clients and FANS happy and connected and your brand top of mind. Building their trust combined with a proven sales framework and client-centric strategy, makes for a stronger client experience and increased revenue.   

In our next blog  

The common factor between Account Based Selling, the HubSpot Flywheel and nurturing your clients and FANS is data. Data validates or challenges your assumptions about target market, messaging, and whether or not your selling efforts are getting optimum results. In our next blog, we will discuss in more detail how to harness and leverage data to build trust, nimbly respond to changes that require a shift in your selling strategies and to create reporting and analysis that helps you make effective business decisions and continue to create a remarkable client experience. 

Don’t miss this next blog in the series. If you haven’t already subscribed, we invite you to do so. 

Please contact us to learn more about MarketLauncher, or any of the materials discussed in this blog.