It is a well-known (and often recounted) fact that retaining an existing customer is significantly cheaper than getting a new customer. That is not to say that retention is free; It is not!

Maximizing the retention rate of your existing installed base is a critical success factor in maintaining excellent growth.

To retain the customer you must offer them either an exceptionally good product, or at least a product that is better (or just as good as) the competition. Changing a solution, especially to one from a different vendor can be complex and time consuming and therefore expensive and risky for any business. Given the choice most customers would prefer to stick with a solution that they have, and invest in making it better as opposed to changing. But if a vendor does not provide the support and investment to make a customer happy there will always be a level of movement, and this can be very costly.

The only reason why a customer will choose to change a solution is if they have a problem, which they believe someone else can solve more easily than their existing vendor. These problems can be technical, financial or emotional in nature.

In just about every B2B situation a customer would experience some level of complexity or cost in changing solutions, so they must have material reason to want to change before considering it.

That reason may well be a competitor creating fear, uncertainty or doubt about your solution. It can be critical for your business to have good intelligence about these competitive pressures, and to create a good process for being able to capture and consider these competitive situations.

Your support organization and service organization may well have information on existing customer satisfaction, but if they are not incentivized correctly they may not want to share the information broadly inside your own organization.

Retention marketing can enable much higher levels of retention with your existing customers at significantly lower cost then any other process. Retention marketing can also provide a way of identifying new product and service opportunities within your existing accounts at a much lower cost then adding additional sales people or business development staff.

B2B cubed has delivered successful retention marketing for multiple fortune 500 companies, and been able to help increase retention rates to very close to 99%. We have also been able to deliver significant increases in new business from existing accounts through the same processes. Retention marketing is also an excellent way of increasing customer satisfaction and building high-quality references.

If you would like B2B cubed to enhance your retention and your retention marketing programs please call us today.