When to Fire a Client
By Michael Kline
Imagine if you only worked with clients who inspired you and appreciated your knowledge, skills and passion. Imagine a world where most days, you felt almost guilty getting paid to do the work you do because you find it so rewarding. Welcome to my world. I consider myself incredibly lucky to get to do the work I do. Most of my regular followers know it wasn’t always this way, of course.  I have spent plenty of time being grumpy, wrongfully unappreciative of my life, and wasting time placing my energy in the wrong places. Decades of hard work and lots of difficult and expensive lessons have taught me that happiness is a decision. There are plenty of people in this world whom I was born to serve. That makes me happy. I want happiness. Like you, I’m happiest when I feel productive. Productivity drives happiness. Passion drives productivity. Let’s follow our passion.

Are you doing the math yet? Passion = Productivity = Happiness = Success. If you work in your area of passion, and you work with clients who feed the passion, you can only be successful and happy.

If you truly want to grow your business and enjoy your work, you would do well to limit your work to those clients who feed your passion. It may be time to drop the duds. Eventually, you will get frustrated, limit your service to them, or get short with them. If you’re trying to please clients who are not your target market, or who don’t truly value your service, they will eventually become unhappy with you and fire you anyway. It is far better to be proactive with your less-than-festive client relationships.  Here’s what I suggest:

Make a list of your favorite clients. I don’t mean just financially speaking, but that’s an important part, so let’s get that out of the way.  Analyze the profitability of the relationship – those who pay the most are not necessarily the most profitable – sometimes they end up costing you money depending on the time, energy and resources they demand. Make a list of the best clients you have now, and write down why you identify them as your best. Write down if the issue is financial, friendly, inspiring you to do your best work, refers others to you, make you more inventive, a joy to work with, etc. Now make a list of your least favorite clients and their traits and characteristics that earn them a spot on that list. 

Can any of the negative clients be coached into becoming a better client? If not, can you afford to tell them that you can no longer service them? You’re not going to like this – but I would argue that you cannot afford to keep them. It’s time to refer them out to someone else with whom they may be a better fit. If you take the time and energy now wasted on your worst clients, and invested it in marketing yourself to your ideal target audience (prospects with traits similar to your best clients), you will greatly improve your cash flow, your energy, your productivity and live a longer, more fulfilling and happier life.

At this point, most of you are in one of two camps. One, you argue that this is easy for me to say, but reality requires you to “suck it up” and stick with the dud clients. Or, perhaps you believe me, but you’re panicking over the thought of losing revenue.  There is a caveat. If you’re going to make your life enjoyable and make more money, you’ll need a good plan to find the replacement client who will pay you more to do better work. More important than the good plan however, is to create the room in your life for the better clients in the first place, and to create the desperate need in your gut to go get the new clients, so you can stop taking the lazy, unfulfilling path of least resistance you’ve been stuck on. It’s scary, lonely and difficult; why do you think everyone isn’t wildly successful and happy?

Michael Kline is a local retailer, success coach and trainer. He may be reached through his website, www.klineseminars.com, or e-mail, mike@klineseminars.com.
Add Comment
 
 
Increasing retail sales is often within the power of the retailer. Let’s simplify what contributes to total sales.  You have traffic, some of whom will buy and you have an average sale price.  Your traffic X the closing ratio X average sale = total sales.  So it’s simple – you only have three things to work on.

This article is not about how to get more traffic - let’s focus on what’s free, easy and immediate - selling more to the traffic you already have.  A certain percentage of your traffic will make a purchase – this is your “closing ratio”.  What do you consider an acceptable percentage?  What was your closing ratio when times were better?  What about on different days of the week or when different employees are working?  By the way, this is an interesting evaluation of employee productivity and sales skills. It’s been proven that just tracking your closing ratio will result in an increase in sales. When I was doing business to business sales, I used to track 100 calls to set 10 appointments and close one sale. Tracking allowed me to notice when something was going awry or if I discovered something that worked better. It later helped me manage my own sales staff and identify where they needed support.  Different businesses of course have very different standards.  Let’s talk about more ways to increase the closing ratio.

Are you using a greeting that represents the best first impression of your business?  “Can I help you?” is no longer acceptable.  Does your staff use what you established to be the most effective script for each type of customer (regular, first timer, just browsing)?  You want every customer to know you’re ready to serve, yet be comfortable.  Think like a food server who is attentive yet invisible.  The point is there is a best practices method of selling for every business.  If your business is lodging, you track your conversion rate and average room rate, but how do you increase the conversions, the average stay and revenue?  If you cold-call on businesses, what’s the difference between you and the stellar performer?  If you’re in retail products or services, some are consistently better than others – why is that?  How do you become the better one?

Have you and your staff received formal sales training recently?  Selling is not about slamming a sale; it’s about satisfying a customer with a solution.  You need to be proficient at interpreting the customers’ desires and hold a high level of expertise on your products.  Making a sale is the reward for being able to help the customer.  Formal sales training on a regular basis dramatically improves closing ratios.

Now that we’re helping more people buy, can we increase the average sale?  No, it’s still not about squeezing the customer for more money.  It’s about making sure the customer has the most thorough solution.  Hear this report from a major travel company - most people who book low-priced rooms on their Hawaiian vacation packages upgrade on arrival once they get jealous of the ocean front people.  The travel agent that sells the package only gets a commission on the low priced room.  What upgrades does your customer really want?  Not everyone wants to save money – in fact, it’s easily argued that people want more for their money and are spending money on better products having realized they no longer want to waste money on inferior items and experiences.  Offer accessories that improve the experience or solution you’re providing.

How do you get it all done?  Systems make everything run more smoothly.  Do you have a sales system? Perhaps your product is sold slowly through a series of appointments.  Perhaps your product simply requires time for a customer to make a choice.  How do you keep the interest alive during this time?  What follow-up steps do you take and what systems do you have in place to make sure no one falls through the cracks?  Think this isn’t a problem?  Just think about the last time you called an office for a quote and never heard back from them at all?!  It happens at great companies. It happens at mine and it happens at yours. 

All this tracking can make you crazy unless you have a system for every step of the sales/service process. That means a best-practices system for everything from greeting to needs analysis to presentations to closing and handling objections to follow-up after the sale.

Now do the math – if you increase your closing ratio and even had a modest average ticket gain, what would that amount to in dollars for you?  If you have room for improvement in your company – retail, wholesale, hospitality, travel, insurance, business to business, you could benefit greatly by reviewing or developing a sales system. 
Add Comment