Eric Siu: In this video, I'm going to talk about the biggest lever you can pull, the biggest lever to grow any business. I'm Eric Siu, and I'm here to help you grow your business, so if you like videos like this, just go ahead and hit subscribe.
The biggest lever you can pull by far, with any business at all ... Think about it. What is it? Just think about it for a second. It's retention. Retention is the biggest lever you can pull to grow any business. Why? Because you're serving your customers at the end of the day. It's not one transaction and you're done.
Let's use my mom, for example. Asian mom in real estate, she does really well. She gets referrals all the time. If you do an exceptional job and people remember you, you're going to get referrals. Retention leads to referrals. It's a lot easier to keep a customer and grow them versus trying to acquire new customers all the time.
If you can't retain customers, that means there's fundamentally something wrong with your business, you're not doing a good job, and you should be figuring out how you can improve.
If you have to replace 50% of your customers every single year, how much harder is it going to be to grow your business? Retention lead to referrals. You think about my mom all the time, she's established her own little niche in the Asian community where she gets referrals all the time from these Chinese cash buyers. Good for her. She gets referrals. It's because she goes out of her way. She'll roll up her sleeves and she will redecorate the homes on her own. She'll also take part of her commission and buy them a washer and dryer and buy them additional gifts. That's a memorable real estate agent. It's not just all about the money all the time.
When you're able to retain, you can also upsell and cross-sell, too. Because they like you already, they're going to buy more from you.
We have our marketing agency, but we also have a SaaS product, too. One of our clients that works with us on the SEO side just came on, and then they're coming on for the SaaS product, too. Another one of our SEO clients were upselling to a longer term deal and then also a much higher dollar value contract. It's because they like you. It's because when we go to New York, for example, to visit these clients, we have lunch with them. We have them come to dinners, too. We go above and beyond. We build a relationship. We become friends.
The final thing I'll say around this is that you have to focus on customer development, which is something I've talked about before. If you don't know about customer development, I recommend reading up on what Steve Blank has written about customer development, and you should think about having a customer success team in the future, too. These people are the people that are not your sales team, but they're focused on making sure that the customer gets what they need and that they're actually succeeding, where that leads to upsells, cross-sells, retention, all that kind of stuff. They're responsible for helping with retention. They might be doing different things, but they're responsible for that at the end of the day.
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