The easiest and best way of growing customers is not to lose them. An average business makes a loss of about 20 percent of customers every year, on not being able to attend to customer relationships. The leakage can be as high as about 80 percent. The cost is staggering, yet only a few businesses can truly understand these implications. The result of customer retention does compound with time, and in unexpected ways. Even the tiniest change in customer retention may cascade through the business system, and multiply with time. The consequence of both long term profit as well as growth should not be underestimated.

The fruitful results of the small business marketing consulting lead generation, branding, client retention, sales conversion, client engagement and customer engagement to customer retention may all focus on lead generation via marketing and business conversion via sales or say, retention engagement via the customer service. However, concentrating on one or two others will not touch the profits most of the small business owners seek as they review the bottom line.  Having only the leads will see you spending excessive money, as well as time, on inviting new clients and this is the popular cost intensive part of the whole profit building structure.

Lead generation happens to be the focus of marketing, leading to web and online marketing. With sales and modern marketing tools like marketing automation or customer relationship manager, lead generation strategies should evolve and lead to lead management, which further extends the marketing role from the top to bottom. In order to be undoubtedly effective, lead management needs the proper people, correct framework, flawless process, systems, a company culture to have a single, compact integrated sales and marketing process.

If the only focus is on the sales conversion, some sort of leads to convert anything, the total leads directly impact upon the total converted sales possible.  And, only focusing on customer service when it is the highly cost effective segment of the generate, convert, retain process, it is a moot point if you have no converted customers to retain.  Remembering the fact that, the three functions are essential in order to maintain a regular profit margin for longevity of small businesses is imperative.  You must be wondering why many CEOs keep worrying about the initial section of the identified lead generation trifecta?  Business owners often are tense about completion of the sales pipeline and they forget the need of transforming the pipeline and retaining what has to be efficient in new business ventures and cost savings while keeping clients.

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Originally published on: Democrat and Chronicle

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