Creative Juices

EVERY business out there, including yours and mine, gets its revenue from the same three buckets—regardless of what we sell or do. You are going to hit your numbers and grow your business from the same three buckets of people, not products:

1. Current customers
2. Past customers
3. New customers

That’s it. Instead of focusing your marketing and business development efforts on how to push product or sell services, focus on the people who use them.

Here’s how. Customers come and customers go. They flow in and out of your business much like water flows in and out of a lake. The lake represents your current customer base. Your past customers are the run-off over the dam. When it rains, new business fills the lake.

Perhaps now, more than ever, is a good time to look at your lake. How would your marketing change if you were told that the only way you could create revenue for the rest of the year was to market to your lake of current customers. What would you do? Have you checked the dam for leaks lately? What could you do to strengthen the dam, go deeper and wider within the lake (your current book of business)?

And what about the ones who “went over the dam”? What can you do to re-connect and re-direct past customers back to the beach? Do you even know who they are and why they left?

The lake and the run-off already know you—at least to some degree. Rainmaking could take more time and perhaps more money. Why not go for a swim before you do the rain dance?