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LAS VEGAS – The Paint, Body and Equipment Specialists (PBES) segment of the Automotive Aftermarket Industry Association (AAIA) hosted a town hall breakfast Friday morning featuring business growth expert and author Steven S. Little who covered “The Ten T’s of Customer Acquisition & Retention: Proven Initiatives for Building Relationships and Profits.”
The former president of three fast-growth companies, Little has extensive experience advising business leaders on growing organizations. He shared some of his best techniques with attendees, many of whom took detailed notes during the event in order to apply Little’s strategies to the collision repair industry.
“The Ten T’s are processes we must get better at every day,” explains Little. “The more you know about your customers, the better able you’ll be to retain them and use them to bring you more customers.”Little’s Ten T’s include:
1. Training – this is the first place to look to improve customers satisfaction and retention. You should concentrate on understanding better ways to serve customers and why.
2. Touches – every time you touch a customer it’s an opportunity to succeed or fail. Every invoice, phone call, every way you contact customers is a touch, and every contact is an opportunity.
3. Total View – any business owner at any time must have a grasp of the big picture.
4. Technology – necessary to compete and differentiate your business from the competition utilizing the Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system. Better technology delivers better touches.
5. Tailor your message for individual customers. Before the current technology boom, tailoring a message was called mass customization; now it’s mass “customer-ization.” There is no such thing as standard terms. Think about things in the simplest terms. Perceptions are reality – how is your product perceived? That’s what matters most, regardless of quality.
6. Trenching – digging into data. Who buys from us? What do our customers look like compared to potential customers? Can we find others that look like them? What patterns can we find in our customers that can predict future retention?
7. Time Bombs – time is of the essence. We are obsessed with time in our culture, so take care of customers in a timely manner.
8. Tractable – this term means to be susceptible to suggestions and have a personality that is aware of others’ desires.
9. Telepathy – read the customer’s mind, because customers don’t know what they want. “The customer is always right” only applies in a customer service department, otherwise Little says they’re barely right. You need to know customers better than they know themselves.
10. Tenacity – stick to it and ask one question that really matters: Are your customers really going out and selling for you?
Little, who was a senior consultant for Inc. magazine, is the author of the best-selling books “The 7 Irrefutable Rules of Small Business Growth” and “The Milkshake Moment: Overcoming Stupid Systems, Pointless Policies and Muddled Management to Realize Real Growth.”
