I receive a daily short email inspiration from Simon Sinek. One from the past came to mind this week:
“To drive sales, make a pitch.
To build loyalty, make a friend.”
We can generalize this message to every area of our business, and in particular to customer relationships. In a recurring revenue business, retention of customers is key. Keeping a customer starts with meeting their needs, but we should not lose sight of the imperative to build a lasting customer relationship and make a friend. Markets tend to act like communities, where the participants know each other and seek input and counsel from each other. As vendors, we need promoters in the community, and we need them to tell their friends that our company is the best thing that ever happened to them. That starts with us committing to their success and building friendships with our customers.
A true customer advocate knows that customers are more than just a recurring revenue line item on a financial report. A customer advocate knows that customers talk with each other and share their opinions. Bad service has a ripple effect like dropping a pebble in a lake. The ripples fan out and will touch many more people than the original individual with the service issue. The whole concept behind the Net Promoter Score (NPS) is a recognition that customers can be advocates, detractors, or neutral, but only the advocates and the detractors count. That is because only these two groups create ripples in your market.
If we stick with the friend theme, we know that making a customer our friend will help to create a sense of trust. A friend believes that you have their best interest at heart, and the bond of friendship engenders trust. It also creates some space when things don’t go exactly as planned, because our friends trust that they can rely upon us to make things right.
At the end of the day, we are still a vendor and they are our customers. They pay us to get things right, but even in a transactional relationship, we can still work to build friendships. As friends, we can get beyond transactional activities and earn trust. It is particularly important in a recurring revenue relationship for the customer to know that we have a long-term commitment to their success. When A recurring revenue relationship feels like it is based on a series of transactions, there is no bond. Each transaction becomes make or break — a ‘pitch’ instead of a friendship. The result is a relationship that bounces up and down based on the outcome of each transaction. We see this in customers being enthusiastic references one week and unwilling to help the next. When we think about our interactions as a way to build a relationship, we create lasting loyalty, and we convert a series of pitches, into a trusted friendship.
Communicating with customers needs to be bidirectional, personal, frequent, candid, open, consistent, wide-ranging, and honest. It has to have an analog component to go with the digital (voice to go with the text, email, questionnaires, etc.). To build friendships, the analog components (video chats and in-person meetings) are more important than any digital ‘pitches.’ It is hard (nearly impossible) to make friends without actually talking.