New customers. New leads. New business. Sounds synonymous, right? In a way, when you are in an acquiring mindset – you are all in for anything that turns gold.

And why not? Commercial success is important for any business to sustain. You onboard more employees – people who can carry the baton of your company’s brand in the business ecosystem. And if they are treated well, they would be your best internal customer advocates.

While acquisition mindset is the constant for your business to grow, retention mindset will help your business to thrive and sustain in the long-term.

Come to think of it – if you flounder with your existing customers, you will feel the aching pinch on a bigger scale than you would when you are not acquiring new customers.

Now, business is the engine that needs to be nurtured well, but it’s your brand that essentially captures the mind space of your customers and stakeholders, even when things go awry in your market.

So where does the retention mindset fit into this context?

A few takes, in various connotations:

  • Your customers need you more than you think. They have an innate understanding of your brand before they chose to do business with you. Chances – and possible bigger ones – are, they have read you visually, emotionally and logically about your brand and then deduced a decision to make you a part of their growth, collectively. They want more nurturing and constant assurance to keep up with their business challenges.
  • Upselling and cross-selling are always simpler with your existing customers than is it is when you are in a pre-screening round for you to qualify, and be qualified, by your prospective customers.
  • Retention of your brand, in the form of value systems, persona, and purpose, over a period of time shapes your audience’s perception of your brand’s existence and doesn’t dilute in a jiffy.
  • Your aspirational growth is balanced by the operational excellence when you have to keep up with the business maintenance tasks. Hence, retention slowly seeps into your culture and responsibility areas.
  • Further, retention implicitly empowers you to treat all your existing and new customers with care and precision in order to provide a seamless customer experience that they have never experienced before.
  • And lastly, retention helps you connect with your stakeholders in a deeper form: as you duly respect how others accept your brand, thereby creating an unspoken bond of trust, empathy, and compassion.

Remember: as they say, ‘customer retention is the biggest acquisition lever’ – and rightly so.

Over to you.

How are you widening the retention space of your brand in your customer’s mind?

Chime in!