How To Sell Yourself The Joe Girard Way

Client Relationship Building, Ideal Client, Sales Techniques, Systems, lifetime value Comments

The Guinness Book of World Records listed Joe Girard as the “World’s Greatest Retail Salesman” for 12 consecutive years.

To achieve this accolade, he sold cars… in fifteen years he sold 13,001 in all. That’s individual brand new retail cars, not fleet or second-hand cars. Allowing for holidays and weekends, that works out to an average of 6 cars a day – every day – for the 15 year period.

Joe had always struggled in his life. With no formal education to speak of (he was expelled from school for a heated argument with a teacher) he moved from one manual labour job to another – dishwasher… dock worker… stove assembler.

He finally met and was taken under the wing of Abraham Saperstein, a Building Contractor who owned his own business. Saperstein liked Joe’s attitude and vowed to teach him everything about the building business. It seemed Joe had finally found his purpose in life. Their friendship grew over the years, until finally Abraham retired, handing over the business to him. Things couldn’t have looked much better…

However… all did not last long… a bad Real Estate deal for some private homes in Detroit cost him his business. He was left without a job, without any savings, and a debt of $60,000. Joe finally hit rock bottom when his wife, June, tearfully told him there was no food in the house and that their kids were begging for something to eat…

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Building Customer Loyalty

Client Relationship Building, Ideal Client, lifetime value Comments

Last time, I went through the importance of understanding the TRUE customer lifetime value of customers and clients to your business, and how to calculate it.

This time I want to look at WHY it’s important to use this information to focus on building customer loyalty, and retaining your clients for longer.

As I mentioned in the last article, it is between 5 and 8 times more expensive to attract a NEW customer to your business than it is to sell more of your products and services to an EXISTING customer.

But when you realise that the majority of the cost of servicing a customer is in attracting them in the first place, why then do the majority of business owners – and many of the “experts” advising them – STILL focus on lead generation?

Let me ask you…

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How Important Is Customer Lifetime Value?

Foundations, lifetime value Comments

How would you like more clients or customers right now?

Would you like another 10… another 100… another 1000?

Now – how would you like to attract those new clients or customers in a way that saves you possibly thousands of pounds in wasted marketing?

… and yes, it absolutely IS possible.

Knowing your Customer Lifetime Value (or LTV) is the key, because it provides you with a better means of understanding what a customer is REALLY worth to your business.

If you can calculate a customer’s true worth, then you can use that information as a marketing tool to strategically plan profitable growth. But understanding the value of a customer to your business is a lot more than just a monetary figure…

It also helps you get to the heart of customer retention, which is one of the key areas that can make a HUGE difference to your business – 5% increase in customer retention equates to approx 35% increase in profits – but I’ll be covering this in more detail in the next post.

One of the problems is, that it is no longer financially viable for the majority of companies to ‘mass market’ their products or services. Over recent years there has been enormous pressure on businesses– especially service organisations – to improve the way they do business with their customers.  Many organisations however, overlook the potential of existing customers to develop their business.

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