What if twenty five percent of your business walked out the door, today? Would you know why? Could this exodus have been stopped? Did you see the warning signs? Do you have a plan to replace a loss? These are all good questions that a concerned business owner should ask. But, the timing of when to ask is crucial. This disaster can be avoided by having a clear strategy for relating to your customers and developing your business. If your company doesn't have a business development and customer retention strategy, then you need one.

We have all heard the term CRM, but what does it really mean? It certainly isn’t new, as companies have been catering to client needs for decades, but it is receiving considerable attention these days. CRM is the process of learning customer preferences and integrating customer satisfaction into all customer dealings for the purpose of building a corporate philosophy based on customer loyalty. Take special note of the word process. It doesn’t require the purchase of any special software, only the application of a corporate wide customer-centric attitude. The benefits of a clear CRM strategy are well worth your efforts. A clear strategy develops a mutually beneficial relationship between company and customer, fosters a mutual learning environment and focuses on the customer’s lifetime value. This is what business development is all about.

Your customer view must extend beyond the next print job. Your focus must be long-term and consider the amount of business a client brings throughout the lifetime of the relationship. Long relationships bring profit, while short relationships require you to look for new customers often. This is more costly than cultivating your existing clients. While most executives give lip service to having a cohesive company strategy, odds are that a poll of key individuals within an organization will yield divergent opinions about what is important and what is not. I have personally witnessed this lack of consensus in a wide range of companies and worked with management to develop a clear path forward. When management doesn't agree on the details, the strategy is "fuzzy". In sales, clear always beats fuzzy!

Getting your customer's mind share can be a significant challenge. The need to cut through information clutter is shared by most businesses. An excellent way to achieve this is through one-to-one communications. Nevertheless, in order to implement your plan, you must first capture customer-specific information. If your goals are cost-effective sales and JIT delivery, then you need to know if these objectives are shared by your clients. In order to know this, you need to have an interactive and on-going relationship with your customers. Post the following formula on the wall and encourage all employees to live by it:

Dialogue = Information
Information = Knowledge
Knowledge = Loyalty
Loyalty = Profit
Therefore: Dialogue = Profit.

Managing your customers requires capturing customer intelligence. Although this knowledge can be harnessed with enterprise software, a pencil and piece of paper works too. Whatever method you choose, the following steps will assist in managing this process. Group customers into categories, which are made up of customers with similar needs, and assign customer support personnel as category managers who view the lifetime value of each customer as a managed asset. Once this has been done you need to set a strategy for each customer and category, effectively manage communications for a continuation of dialogue and offer an expanding menu of new products and services. By implementing ongoing dialog and catering to customer needs, your surprises will be confined to birthday gifts, and the dual objectives of nurturing happy customers and generating a healthy bottom line will be met. This is the essence of business development.

Seven Steps To Business Development
1. Know what the customer needs.
2. Determine what s/he likes dislikes.
3. Assign internal personnel who are responsible for customer care feeding.
4. Create new benefits, services and/or products based on customer input.
5. Foster company-wide attitude: "If it wasn’t for this customer, I wouldn’t have my job".
6. Maintain customer dialogue, which has value for the customer (not just lame mailings and calls).
7. Maintain an on-going feedback loop to preclude neglected relationships.