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Today we’re going to talk about retention. A seemingly unsexy topic that needs to be addressed as it’s truly essential to your business, large or small.

The probability of a happy customer leaving is similar to that of an unhappy one.

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Search your memory, you probably don’t want to remember that seemingly happy client that didn’t renew with you.

So let’s dive into topic.

I’m sure your business is already obsessed with client satisfaction (if not, make it your obsession).

Client satisfaction ≠ retention

What we’ll cover:

- Don’t Lose Clients Anymore (All about Retention)

- Tools I Found for You and Your Team

Don’t Lose Clients Anymore (All About Retention)

Retention is Essential

You obsess on client acquisition. We all do. You need more leads, more clients, more conversion.

A pretty normal focus for a business. Yet you could start having big issues.

Why?

A lack of focus on your business’ financial health by not managing a healthy client book.

Acquisition without retention is like having holes in water bucket. You fill it up but it loses water.

Think of retention as an indicator of a strong Product/Market fit.

Why Satisfaction ≠ Retention

You'd be forgiven to think that to delight a customer should be the most efficient way of making them want to stay.

Sort of.

Satisfaction and retention are two sides of the same coin.

Satisfaction is a state ≠ Retention is an action.

Satisfaction is a feeling ≠ Retention is provoked and activated.

Satisfaction comes from a delightful experience ≠ Retention is a decision about the now and future.

Satisfaction contributes to retention yet isn’t the unique consequence.

In essence, retention is the result of a deliberate strategy.

Simply put, satisfaction isn’t enough, it’s a commodity.

3 Types of Retention

1- Continuous

It’s predictable and closely linked to satisfaction. For example, a SaaS CRM with a recurring monthly/annual fee.

2- Discontinuous

Users understand the value of the product but have a sporadic need for it. For example, a prospecting tool used to fill your pipeline during a specific sales cycle. The relationship between satisfaction and retention is eroding.

3- Intentional

A demanding type of retention that concerns mostly service and retail businesses. In this context, retention isn’t a given.

A few things businesses can do to remain sticky:

• Create a consumption habit (i.e. buy bread everyday)

• Create a strong brand

• Bring value beyond the business relationship: content, events or community (i.e. Single User Utility)

• Focus on customer experience and overdeliver

Let’s focus on the customer experience in the next part…

6 Reasons for Churn (Why Clients Leave)

1. Change of context: things have changed from when they started with you, they move on.

2. Bad Product/Market Fit: customer wasn't qualified, making the solution a bad fit for their pain.

3. Misalignment: circumstances evolve enough that the solution no longer fits the pain.

4. Quality: the promised value, the created value and the perceived value don't match. The outcome falls short, the client leaves.

5. Customer experience: bad communication, slow reaction, unclear. Something frustrated the customer.

6. Poor start: the time between the purchasing decision and the start of delivery

Out of these 6 reasons, you can only control the last 3. Make sure you do by implementing internal processes that positively impact your customers experience.

How to Boost Retention?

We saw that retention is often confused with client satisfaction when in effect it’s ¼ of the story.

Here are the 4 components that you need to adjust continuously:

1. Satisfaction reminds the client of the delight of having worked with you

2. Vision tells the client where you’re headed as you continue working together

3. Intention helps you make sure you’re still aligned as a partner

4. Trigger pushes you to act, now.

5 Things to Implement in Your Business Now

1- Define your Customer Journey

The Customer Journey maps each step of the customer relationship. It helps you identify the dysfunctional or missing steps.

Put all the chances on your side by delivering the best client experience possible.

2- Shorten your Time-to-Value

This is the time between the client signing and them getting the value they were looking for.

You’re trying to shrink the delay between signature and delivery as much as possible.

3- Help your client to visualise the value

Regardless of your product or service, help your clients to visualise what you bring to the table.

Create a dashboard to showcase results, send an email recaps, call your client to keep them in the loop.

There should be no question around what value you’re bringing.

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4- Train your teams in Account Management basics

It will never be a wasted skill to train your team in how to best handle client relationships. Coach them to:

• Show results

• Put those results in context

• Listen and analyse any potential customer complaint

• Transform those complaints into future enhancements

5- Work on your Product Market Fit

Lack of retention is often a lack of alignment between the product offering and the target market.

Conclusion

1. Satisfaction is a state. Retention is an action. They’re two sides of the same coin.

2. Good client acquisition is nothing without good activation and retention. They’re all linked by the quantity of value you bring to the client.

3. A client leaves for 5 reasons: change in context, lack of PMF, lack of quality, bad CX and long activation (Time-to-Value).

4. Retention is the intersection of past satisfaction, present alignment and future perspective.

5. 5 things you can do now: define your Customer Journey, shorten your Time-to-Value, help your clients visualise the value, upskill your team in Account Management and evolve your PMF.

Donc forget:

A delighted client brings 3 others.

A happy client can potentially bring 1 other.

An unhappy client can make you lose 5 others.

Tools for You and Your Team

Folk.io : is HubSpot and Pipedrive overkill for your needs? Do you want a single place to keep all your contacts and interactions? Business and personal? Well here’s a new type of personal CRM that I’ve been using for a while now. Simple and does the job (Get 20% off by using FOLKXCHARPENET).

Notion: you’ve probably heard about it already. I’ve only recently started using it properly, almost like a second brain. So far it seems a lot more customisable than the likes of Asana, ClickUp or Monday which I’ve all tried.

Follow: a neat Chrome extension that enables you to extract the contact of everyone that liked a specific post in LinkedIn. An unusually effective outbound strategy in the making!

Smartlead: recommended by an SDR agency, they use it because it doesn’t charge you by email accounts but by email sent. A big plus in the agency world. Even beyond that the pricing is very reasonable, compare for yourself with something like Reply. Or if you focus more on LinkedIn, Waalaxy might be right for you.

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