According to sales consulting firm The Brevet Group, it can take 8 cold calls to reach a prospect and 5 follow ups after a meeting to give yourself a good chance of landing a sale. Even then, up to half of all sales go to the first vendor that responds with a workable solution.

Of course, you need new customers to grow and even sustain your business, but it’s important not to overlook the value of customer retention and maximization. Both are exactly what they sound like: customer retention is how many of your customers continue to do business with you over time, and customer maximization means getting the most out of your existing customer relationships. Effectively, we’re talking about selling more to your customers, for longer.

Why is Customer Retention Important?

Okay, we all have a pretty good grasp on this on an intuitive level. It’s not like anyone reading the first section stood up and shouted “why should I keep my customers?” Still, it’s important to take this to the next level and quantify what we’re talking about, so you can make educated decisions on how to focus your efforts.

It’s an old adage in sales and marketing that it costs 5x as much to replace a customer as it does to retain one. Depending on who you ask, that number can be almost anything, but it’s always at least a few times more. Of course, if you’re a freight broker agent, you’re really looking for how you can make more money, more reliably. Simply put, it’s easier to run a business if you have a baseline of recurring or relatively easy to close sales each month. As an example, picture this: you reach out and try to make a sale with 20 contacts, 10 are existing customers, 10 are new leads – how many sales do you make to each group? If you’re an average company, you make 6 or 7 sales to the existing customers and 1 or 2 at best to the new leads. New leads are critically important, but when you’re planning out your day, you may want to focus a little more on deals that are very likely to land. There’s no better lead than a prior sale.

More reliable business is nice, but how much does this really hit the bottom line? One study showed that “increasing customer retention rates by 5% increases profits by 25% to 95%.” If you own your own business, that’s probably all you needed to hear.

How to Retain Customers

You’re going to find a lot of overlap between retaining and maximizing customers, and for good reason. Retaining a customer without maximizing them means that you’ve landed a recurring deal, and now you’re leaving a lot of money on the table by failing to do anything more with that customer. Maximizing a customer without retaining them means you’re either got great profit margins or a high percentage of the customer’s business, and now they no longer do business with you. Either way, you and your customer probably don’t interact much, and are indifferent toward each other at best.

We would all love to discuss a brilliant new strategy for this, but the bottom line is that you need to build a relationship with your customers. If you run a Google search any time for how to retain customers, you’ll get article after article full of great ideas. Honestly, it’s a great idea to run a search and read new articles often. Each of those articles is going to give you ideas on how to build and maintain relationships. In freight brokering, your customer stays with you because they’re confident that you know their needs, you’re reliable, and they’re comfortable working with you. Bottom line: handle their shipments well, and then make sure they know you can do that for more of their shipments.

That last part is also huge when we are discussing automation and technology companies that are working to get some space in the freight brokerage market. No matter how good their technology gets, there’s one thing they can never offer your customers: you. If your customer feels a sense of confidence knowing that you are available to them, then there’s nothing anyone else can offer that replaces that.

Maximizing Customers

Just like retention, there’s no magic formula or big secret to maximizing your sales to each customer. Maybe the most important thing is that you keep this fact in mind: you should be maximizing sales to your existing customers. That has to be one of your goals. It’s a shame not to do it, but it’s easy to get so caught up in prospecting for new clients and handling customer service for existing ones that we forget that a current customer is also a sales opportunity. When it comes down to it, the best lead you’ll ever have is a prior sale.

There are a lot of great ways for any small business to maximize customers. This article breaks them down into three categories: increasing penetration, developing a plan of action, and building credibility and trust. So, what does that mean for a freight broker? It’s a good idea to read the article and think about that for yourself, but let’s quickly summarize each part.

• Increasing Penetration: Are you currently handling a small part of your customer’s freight, or most of it? Talk to your main contact at your customer’s company and see if you can find out if they have any lanes or types of freight you’re not currently handling. See if you can find out if there is anyone else at the company that purchases logistics services, and if you can make contact with that person.
• Developing a Plan of Action: Work with your customer to make sure you know exactly how they want their freight handled and make it clear to them that you understand. Consider combining this step with LDI’s CRM blog to give yourself an advantage in tracking and executing that plan.
• Building Credibility and Trust: Do what you’re going to do, when you say you’re going to do it, and when that goes wrong, make sure your customer hears from you that you know it went wrong and you’re on it. The last thing you want is your customer hearing from their customer that there was a problem with their shipment. Do your best to be in front of any problems and honest with your customer.

If you take nothing else away from this post, just take some time to think about whether you focus enough of your time and energy on retaining your customers and maximizing your sales to them. There are a lot of ways to do that, but the first and most important step is to make it a priority.