Consolidation of a Growth Strategy Into a Marketing Action Plan

by Marcelo Salup

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Create offers and products

One of the most incredible new-business, retention and referral programs I’ve ever seen was created by a law firm in Miami, Becker & Polyakoff, which specialized in Condominium Law. Once a year, every president of every condominium association in Brickell (I’m sure that there were many other areas) was invited to a day-long seminar on construction project management. This was especially useful considering that all of us had to oversee restoration and repair projects continuously (Brickell being right on the ocean is a real problem).  And, by the way, everything I learned has come in useful many many times. This program served as:

  • New business: Many of us gave them our accounts based on their activities with condos
  • Retention: you would get invited year after year and the program had a lot of follow ups
  • Referrall: The vendors that were invited would have never had the opportunity to see us in a single place, so B&P created referral programs for them
  • Cross and Upsell: we naturally got a pitch for the full range of services B&P offered

You don’t have to organize a huge event like that. There are many websites dedicated to helping on the many tasks needed to run retention, referral, cross and upsell programs and all others successfully, so I’m not going to go into a huge amount of detail. There are some basic steps, however, that you need to consider before embarking on them:

  • You need something solid to sell so create specific products and offers. There is no point in sending a client a message that says “check out our website for some fantastic offers”. No one checks them out. It is important to be specific: “Thank you for being our client, as a token of our appreciation, I am inviting you to register in our site for a free webinar on whatever”
  • Look for alliances. Perhaps your clients could use the services of a specialized insurer, you can do a strategic alliance with several other companies and offer their services as an added bonus of doing business with you (you would manage the relationship of course).
  • Solicit feedback. Ask your own clients: what else would you like? How else can you help? I’m sure peopole are not shy to point out improvements.

An event calendar

Ideally, you would create this calendar about 3 months before the beginning of the year, outlining client by client in some cases, exactly what you would do with each one.

This should include:

  • Dates – To make it easier on everyone, perhaps you can consider staggering the dates so that you don’t have to dedicate a full day to getting all the materials out.
  • Specific Materials – will you send out a personal email? A personalized offer? An actual letter? A gift? Unless you have a fantastic newsletter… avoid sending one more tepid newsletter that no one will read. An offer for free Miami Heat tickets works much better.
  • Specific Actions – Some retention programs use prehistoric but effective processes. It’s called a personal meeting. Sometimes inviting a key client to lunch or breakfast, with no agenda except to reassure the client that he/she is appreciated, to ask how your company can help them and to put together, if not a strategic document, at least an action plan, works wonder.

Your calendar should contain: Dates, Materials, Actions and of course, a follow up plan. There are also some readily-available (and free) calendars on the web. If you can’t make your own in Excel you can just Google it.

Dedicate some time to it

When I was SVP and Regional Media Director for Foote Cone & Belding Latin America, I remember one of the Colgate-Palmolive Brand Managers complaining that the strategic planning process took so long (about 2 weeks of solid work for each brand). I asked him one day: “How much do you sell?” “$80 million” he said.

“Well”, I told him,” think about it, you sell $80 million, your salary, you, your family and the family of about 100 more people depend on that brand. You need to take it to $90 million, facing huge competition from P&G and probably Unilever… and you don’t want to spend 2 weeks charting the next 50?”

Your business is your livelihood, quality time dedicated to making sure it grows and that it grows in the right direction is time well spent.

Next in the series: The Not-so-skimpy arsenal of SMB’s.

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