Is Your Coaching Business Leaking Clients?

Transcription

Welcome to another solo round. I hope you’re having a great start to your Monday.

Today we’re talking about if your coaching business is leaking clients, thus, leaking money. Obviously, that’s not a good thing. I want to share an interesting perspective that will make a lot of sense for you.  A lot of businesses don’t focus on this and I don’t know why. It’s the nature of the way we are as humans.

Here’s the thing: Most businesses focus too much on acquisition and not enough on retention.

 

Examples of what to do and not to do if you want to retain customers

I’m guilty of this as much as much any business out there, and I want to share two stories with you. One, I was recently at Club Med in Ixtapa, Mexico. It’s a beautiful area and resort. I love going to Club Med because it’s a great place to take our kids. We have a lot of fun, I get to play tennis all day long, and the food’s amazing.

But there’s still room for improvement. We go to Club Med about twice a year and we’re some of their elite members, if you will. When we got there, our room was upgraded, which was great. We had all these perks, which were nice. I don’t want to sound like I’m complaining about stuff that doesn’t matter, but I look for opportunities to share messages that I think can be helpful for you.

So, while we were there, it was my wife’s birthday. They knew that because it was in their system, and on her birthday, they left a card inside of our room. Actually, it wasn’t a card; it was more of a flyer. The flyer said something like, “Happy Birthday, for your birthday we’d like to offer you 15% off at the gift shop.”

Initially we thought it was a nice gesture, but offering somebody a discount on your own products or services isn’t a gift to the person. That’s a gift for you. It’s like if you go to the airport, your flight gets bumped, and they say, “We’ve overbooked the flight. If anyone would like to give up their seat, we’ll give you a $200 voucher for a future flight with our airline.” That’s not a true gift, right?

I’ll give you a better example of this from the airlines as well. When we were flying to Morocco earlier in the year, we flew through Frankfurt in Germany with Lufthansa. Lufthansa had overbooked the flight going back to Toronto and they offered 600 Euros cash per person to give up their seat.

There were six of us, so we said, “Sure, we’ll spend an extra day going to Geneva and then you guys can fly us back.” So, we made 3,600 Euros, not a voucher for Lufthansa, because we actually flew back on Air Canada the next day. That’s a better example of how to treat your customers.

Going back to the Club Med example, a simple birthday card would’ve been a better gift for Amy. Maybe something like, “Hey, hope you have a great birthday. If there’s anything we can do to make your stay even more enjoyable today, let us know.” That would’ve been better than giving her a 15% discount in addition to the 50% discount we already have as gold members of Club Med.

If you’re gifting stuff to people whom you want to build relationships with, never send them your own stuff. Don’t give them a discount code to your own store. Don’t give them your own product. It’s too self-serving.

The second example I want to share with you is cell phone companies. In Canada, we have two big ones: Bell and Rogers. The only time they go above and beyond to “love you” is when you threaten to leave. That’s a terrible business model. You’re paying an arm and a leg for your cell phone and internet service, and the only time they’ll budge is when you’re up for renewal, your contract’s about to expire, or when you threaten to leave to another carrier.

That’s not a great way to love your clients, and that’s why I believe a lot of businesses suffer because they’re not focused on retention. This has been a very big focus of ours at Healthpreneur, especially since the latter quarter of 2017. I’m not perfect by any means. I’ve made some negligent errors that have cost us some of our clients. I’ll be very honest with you about that.

Looking back, knowing what I know now, these are things that I wish I would have put in place about a year and a half ago to avoid those things from happening.

Focusing on acquisition instead of retention and loving your current clients

What it all comes down to is that most clients stop doing business with a coach, provider, or business of any sort because they don’t feel appreciated or heard. Remember this: it’s human to human, whether we’re selling to consumers or businesses. They’re still humans. We’re not dealing with robots, and if you’re not doing things to make your clients feel special, appreciated, and not just like a number, your business is going to suffer.

Look at how long people stay with you or ascend to higher levels of business with you. If you’re not doing things to appreciate the individuals within your business, the clients as well as the team members, your business is going to have a tough time.

 

Why a high-churn business isn’t sustainable, even if you love the hunt

You’re going to end up having to focus on acquisition, acquisition, acquisition, because it’s a high-churn type of business. You get people, they pay you, then they leave, whether they get results or not. That’s never a good place to be in.

Again, I share this with you because this is a dilemma that I face myself.

I love the thrill of the hunt, like most people who enjoy selling do. We love closing or enrolling the client and sometimes the natural tendency is to think, “Alright, good. Next,” and move on to the next hunt.

I’ve had to catch and stop myself from doing this several years ago, so I could focus on the customer’s experience and journey. I started mapping out every single touchpoint they’d move through in our business so we could make it as amazing as possible for them.

 

Going deep instead of wide to retain your clients

Let me give you another example. Several years ago, we were at the Four Seasons hotel in Santa Barbara, which is one of the nicest Four Seasons. It’s amazing. I was there with my wife, Amy and our middle child. We have this tendency to take all our kids, one by one to Santa Barbara. I’m not too sure why. We just love the city.

Anyways, we were there with him when he was about six or eight months old and it was Amy’s birthday. Contrary to what we had experienced in Club Med just a couple months ago for Amy’s birthday, the Four Seasons did up our room with a bottle of wine and a beautiful basket. There was no, “Hey, here’s 15% off the gift shop.” It was just, “Here’s a bottle of wine. Here’s some great food. Here are some chocolates. Here are some grapes.” It was a nice gesture.

That’s the difference in thinking what could you do. The fun part about business is thinking about how to create a Disney-like experience for your clients.

Although we aren’t 100% dialed in yet, we’re constantly evolving and looking at how we can fill in some of the gaps and plug some of the leaks by making every single touchpoint as special as possible for our clients. We know that yes, we can go out and acquire clients, but it is so much more expensive to acquire clients than it is to retain the existing ones that you have and go deep with them.

Our whole Healthpreneur philosophy is to go deep instead of wide.

I don’t know what your business philosophy is, but I think that’s a nice approach, especially in this world where people easily switch between businesses, coaches, and providers by determining the difference between people and services.

A lot of it comes down to cost. If you can get something for cheaper with the same result, you’ll probably go the cheaper route. My challenge for you is to think about how to avoid becoming a commodity by providing an amazing experience and result.

 

How we can help

How can you focus on retention? How can you focus on the client experience instead of just acquiring new clients over and over again?

That’s what I want to leave you with today. Plug those leaks in your business. If you want help with this, we can certainly help you. If you’re at the point where you’re just figuring out how to get more clients, we can help. If you want to figure out how to create an amazing experience for your existing clients, we can work through that with you as well. The first step is to book a call with us.

So, if you want us to get on the phone with you, we’ll spend 45 minutes figuring out where you are, where you want to go, what’s holding you back, and we’ll put together a game plan that’s specific for you and your business. If that’s of interest to you, head on over to healthpreneurgroup.com/book to book your call today.

We look forward to chatting with you. We’ve got a lot of these calls every single week with health coaches, practitioners, trainers, nutrition experts, you name it. It’s amazing to have these conversations, build these relationships, and show how we can serve these awesome people and move their business forward.

That is all for today’s show. Coming up this Wednesday, we have an amazing interview with Marnie Greenberg. On Friday, we’re talking with Andrea Nakayama. These are two amazing guests that you want to tune in for this week. With that said, I hope you have an amazing day, continue to get out there, be great, do great, and I’ll see you in the next episode.