Like Marketing, Client Retention Is A Crucial Business Function
Some may argue that it's the most important business function. Why?
Because the cost of acquiring a new customer can be as much as FIVE TIMES higher than retaining an existing one
The most successful coaches ensure their clients achieve results; what they sell aligns with the outcomes that their clients receive.
Marketing & sales are important, but Customer Retention tactics magnify every business function, and without them, your coaching practice is doomed to mediocrity or, worse, failure.
This is a crash course in why Client Retention is so important in your coaching business.
Let's talk loyalty data
- Statistics show an increase in customer retention by 5% can lead to a company's profit growing by 25% to around 95% over time.
- Existing customers are 50% more likely to try new products and spend 31% more than new customers
- Businesses with a robust retention program see a customer lifetime strategy increase of 125%
- Customers with an emotional relationship with a brand have a 306% higher lifetime value and will recommend the company at a rate of 71%, rather than the average rate of 45%
- The average customer spends 67% more in their third year than their first year with a business.
This list goes on and on but the message is simple. When you find your customers, make sure you have a strategy in place to drive long-term outcomes and results.
If you ALREADY have customers and you're debating on if you should invest more in your marketing budget OR a retention strategy.
I'd lock down your retention strategy.
What is Customer Retention? Isn't it Just Customer Service?
No. Customer service may play a role in retention, but retention is a more holistic approach to delivering outcomes set out from the beginning.
Here's a breakdown between the two functions
Customer Service
- Support Type: Reactive
- Department: Customer Support/Service
- Tasks: Troubleshooting, tactical problem solving
- Goals: Issue resolution, customer satisfaction, reduced effort
Customer Retention
- Support Type: Proactive
- Department: Cross-functional
- Tasks: Sales, onboarding, adoption, guidance, value delivery
- Goals: Revenue retention, expansion and product adoption
So, why does it matter in coaching?
Customer Retention teams are tasked with helping clients use their product, service, or problem-solving skills to achieve specific outcomes.
Those outcomes were sold during the sales process.
Those outcomes lead to clients reaching their goals.
When coaching clients reach their goals, you make an impact, and per the above data, you unlock your business growth. More specifically:
- It forces coaches to build products that drive real outcomes
- Increase in your referrals & word-of-mouth marketing
- Minimizes refunds, dropouts, & dissatisfied customers
Basic Steps You Can Take To Focus On Retention
Step 1 | Define Your Customer Journey
What is a Customer Journey?
Phases your customer goes through when interacting with your brand.
It's very similar to a marketing funnel with one key difference. Where marketing focuses heavily on acquisition, the customer journey is designed to map out how fast and how often you can deliver success outcomes to your clients.
It looks at every touchpoint a specific customer persona has with your brand and then it defines their emotions, needs, problems and opportunities during each touchpoint.
Journey mapping is most used in the SaaS and & B2C software space and is FINALLY getting traction the coaching space.
Adopt this practice and you'll be ahead of the curve.
Most coaches have never written out every step that their client takes from start to finish
Even fewer know how to optimize this journey to reduce the time it takes for their clients to see value
Let this map becomes your foundation for delivering successful outcomes and you'll be WAY ahead of the curve.
Actions:
- Intimately understand what their goals are. You can't use every persona because clients may have different goals.
- Sit down, use your most important customer persona, and map out each touchpoint (as seen below) as it stands today.
- Map out problems, notate lengthy delays, and actions that they have to take
Step 2 | Optimize The Customer Journey
What do I do after?
- Sit down & identify ways to drive outcomes earlier and often. Get specific. Is it one less meeting a day. One less fight with their kids? One more amazing night with their partner? One more client?
- Fix High-effort, low-value steps in the journey. Are they spending excess time on actions that don't lead to outcomes?
- Inject simple KPIs into phases to track the progress of each stage. Are you getting referrals in the advocacy stage? Is their LTV increasing? Is their time-to-value decreasing?
Step 3 | Deploy a Success Call
Onboarding impacts client retention more than any other phase
Gainsight, a leader in the retention software space gives a client a negative health score for 6 months if they have a negative onboarding service.
That's because onboarding set's the foundation of the services your provide in the future.
You're a coach; foundation matters A LOT.
But what is a Success Call?
A success call is a planning meeting immediately after you close the sale.
It's a call to build a shared & specific understanding of what success looks like. (We'll provide a template below)
Here's how you structure the call:
- Start With An even deeper Discovery of the client's background
- Screen share the success plan template (In NEXT SLIDE)
- Rearticulate everything You’ve learned in the sales cycle
- Discover & record the exact outcomes they want
- Discover specific data points that would equal goal attainment
- Ask about potential issues that could prevent them from getting those outcomes
- Record the milestones that they/we need to complete to help meet the objectives stated above
- Discover their functional, personal, and personal goals
- This is a living document you’ll both use to stay aligned
Step 3.1 | Improve Onboarding For Low-Touch Clients
Sometimes, as a coach, you'll be deploying a more scalable program like an online course.
You can't have a success call for hundreds of clients in a week; that's crazy.
High-level steps for self-paced programs with communities, pre-recorded webinars, & videos
- Understand and write down the different jobs your course is hired for. Improving sales, health, learning.
- Understand what success looks like for each of these jobs. E.g. increasing conversions, decreasing a mile time, or finding a job.
- Design paths to help them achieve those goals
- Automate communications to help users achieve those goals during each piece of the customer journey.
- Have an early warning system if clients aren't achieving those goals or engaging with content made to deliver outcomes.
Step 4 | Feed The Coaching Business Machine
Use customer retention insights to fuel every aspect of your business.
Learnings in the success call can do for wonders for your business.
- About the customer -> Better targeted ads
- Functional, social, personal goals -> Incredible Ad Copy
- Outcomes -> Testimonials
- KPIS -> Case Studies
- Key challenges -> More marketing copy
Mapping the customer journey before & after for high-touch clients
- 3 days to have an outcome after you close the sale -> Same-day outcome after you close the sale
- Extra steps that don't drive outcomes -> shorter condensed, & more valuable content/process
- Blind to what success means in each stage -> KPIS telling you when customers are successful
Mapping the customer journey before & after for low-touch clients
- Waiting to see if clients finish a course -> Emailing help to clients who don't finish their first module
- Building a course based on delivering information -> Building a course based on successfully completing jobs
- Sending random content to clients after sign-up -> Sending contextual content based on the outcomes they're working on
I hope that this article inspired you to start thinking about your coaching retention strategy.
I'm sure you still have lots of questions because we've just begun to scratch the surface.
If you want to learn more about how we at BuildTheCourse help with retention, shoot us a message!
For more info on Customer Retention Check Out These Resources
- Miro - They have lots of journey mapping templates
- Canva - They have customer success call templates
- The Effortless Experience - A book dedicated to showing you how to reduce the effort for your customers
- Digital Customer Success - A new book teaching you how to adopt technology that drives customer outcomes
- Customer Success - A handbook explaining how to build retention teams focused on customer success.
Happy coursing.
Morgan