Many of us know about the product life cycle but not as many know about or implement the customer lifecycle.

Our focus tends to be on growing customers by working the marketing/social media aspects of our business to fill the hopper with leads that we can qualify into prospects then finally sell our products to a percentage of these people that we can then call customers.

But what happens once they have received our products?

– Do we continue to look after them?
– Do we look to generate advocates of them to help future sales?
– Do we develop a relationship with them?
– Do we seek feedback from them to improve our services and sales experience?

or…

– Do we speak to those that didn’t make it all the way through our sales journey to find out what tripped them up or changed their mind?

It is difficult to spend time on the above questions when we live in a “results now” culture where all energy is expended on the sales process and its measurement. Not forgetting that we have more KPI’s that we can genuinely make use of!

It is a well-known fact that it is harder to win new business than to keep existing business, so why do we focus so much on winning new and not looking after those loyal customers that actually bought from us?

Businesses should now be focussed on ensuring they have invested in the whole of the Customer Lifecycle if they truly want to have a successful, sustainable, long-term business model where their customers love them.