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Almost every business owner or manager will tell you that having loyal customers is the key to a successful business.  If that’s true then what are they doing to keep those customers coming back?

Most will tell you that they send emails or newsletters on a regular basis to keep in touch.  Others will say that they use a discount program to show their appreciation.

It’s not to say that these are bad things but they are not enough.  To create loyalty and get your customer engaged with you takes effort and planning.  Creating strong relationships is one of the most critical ways to retain more of your customers and grow your business faster because happy customers` will use you more and refer friends which will give you a tremendous competitive edge over your competitions.

Here are some statistics showing that challenges that businesses face today:

• Each year the average company loses 10-15% of its customer base
– Bain & Company
• “84% of customers who leave, do so because of poor service”
– Forum Corp
• “A typical business only hears from 4% of its dissatisfied customers—the other 96% leave, 91% for good”
– Jim Barnes, “Secrets of CRM”

By understanding why your customers are leaving you and how you can retain them is priceless information.  The best way to find out what they want is to ask them, read the article ” You Just Need To Ask ” 11/19/2010

The sooner you know what makes your customers tick, the sooner you can begin to cultivate a strong and long lasting relationship to keep your business alive in any economy.

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About The Author:

	Mike Liddicoat is a Husband, Father, Speaker and the Sales & Marketing Director of AttaBoy! Solutions. His goal is to help businesses maintain relationships, ensure future business and acquire new referrals through appreciation marketing. Throughout this blog you can sign up for updates, news, special offers, discounts and more. So take a look around, leave a comment or two and enjoy.
Contact Mike

It doesn’t have to be a special occasion to give a gift. Gifts can be used year round and given to clients, business partners or customers. They can be used to show appreciation to your clients and employees. The question is how do you choose a gift that is remembered and will strengthen the relationships?

1. Be sure it’s something they will use!
The gifts you give should be useful. Don’t just add to the pile of stress balls, pens and key chains that get lost in the back of their desk drawers. Instead, choose something that your clients will actually use … frequently.

2. How about something with some meaning behind it?
Give a gift that will appeal to some aspect of their life, one that you know about through your relationship with him or her. For example, if you know that they spend a lot of time with their family choose something they can all enjoy. When you pay special attention like this and give a gift with meaning it will go a lot further than a logo emblazoned keychain.

3. Perhaps a gift that is helpful!
Everyone loves to receive gifts, especially a gift they can use to make their lives a little easier. Why not give a business publication or subscription or specialty tool related to their business? If you give a gift that shows that you actually took a minute to put some thought toward it will go a very long way, and will be appreciated.

4. How about some non-business quality time with your client?
Sometimes a social gift is perfect for the occasion. If your client likes football, give him tickets to a Cardinals game. Maybe take them to dinner before the game, and while you will probably talk a little business, you will still be building relationships. Heck, you can even have them invite a spouse or friend so you can get to know the important people in their lives and create an even stronger relationship with them.

5. Have some fun!
On occasion it’s ok to give a plain old fun gift, just keep it tasteful.  They say laughter is the best medicine; it’s also a great way to build relationships. Everyone likes to have some fun, and if it can be incorporated into work, even better. Sharing a laugh is one of the strongest relationship building tools I have found.

Regardless of what kind of gifts you give to build relationships and show appreciation, the whole point is to keep good employees with you and to keep your clients from moving on to the competition as well as to refer business to you.

Remember the gift that helps you further your relationship is a powerful gift.

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About The Author:

	Mike Liddicoat is a Husband, Father, Speaker and the Sales & Marketing Director of AttaBoy! Solutions. His goal is to help businesses maintain relationships, ensure future business and acquire new referrals through appreciation marketing. Throughout this blog you can sign up for updates, news, special offers, discounts and more. So take a look around, leave a comment or two and enjoy.
Contact Mike

When it comes time to get a gift for a family member or friend how do you decide what to get.  Well you take into consideration their likes and dislikes, hobbies or interests.

You choose something that, based on your intimate knowledge of them, you know they will enjoy.

But what about when it comes to business gifts?  How do you make a good choice when you may not know that much personal information about your recipient?  One way is to guess.  Get a gift and hope for the best.  However, you may not get them a memorable gift or a gift they can use.  It might just be something they will toss away or give to somebody else.

The best  choice for a gift is one that the recipient makes for themselves.  But how do you do that?

Easy!  Our Gift Collections make giving business gifts and incentives easy by offering the Gift of Choice. With these collections, recipients choose their own gift from a wide selection of top-quality, brand-name merchandise by redeeming them online. It’s the perfect solution for small to mid-size businesses – and virtually every budget, occasion, and event!

How do they work?

It’s simple and convenient for your business. You just:

1. CHOOSE the budget range you want to stay within.
2. BUY a Gift Collection on line or from your sales associate.
3. GIVE the gift to the recipient to redeem for their perfect gift!

Then, the recipient:

1. DISCOVERS and browses their Gift Collection online.
2. SELECTS the perfect gift from the many name-brand items.
3. RECEIVES the gift shipped right to their door, free of charge.

Here are some occasions when these Gift Collections work amazingly well:

• Sales incentives
• Holidays
• Employee weddings/new baby
• Customer thank you
• New customer welcome
• Corporate events
• Promotions
• Service awards
• Employee acknowledgment
• Safety awards

Here is what these Gift Collections can do for your business?

They can be given to employees, co-workers, supervisors, managers, customers, business associates, and service providers to help:

• Increase productivity
• Generate sales increases
• Improve morale
• Strengthen employee performance
• Create a safer workplace
• Inspire great ideas and suggestions
• Develop loyalty and dedication
• Enhance work environment

Why give these Gift Collections?

Well they have been rewarding, motivating, and inspiring employees and customers for nearly 40 years, and they are trusted by businesses because they offer:

• 180-day Satisfaction Guarantee
• Easy online redemption
• Popular brand-name gifts
• No minimum order required
• Monetary value not displayed to recipient
• Saves the time and expense of shopping for gifts

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About The Author:

	Mike Liddicoat is a Husband, Father, Speaker and the Sales & Marketing Director of AttaBoy! Solutions. His goal is to help businesses maintain relationships, ensure future business and acquire new referrals through appreciation marketing. Throughout this blog you can sign up for updates, news, special offers, discounts and more. So take a look around, leave a comment or two and enjoy.
Contact Mike

Can you believe it’s been a year?

Anniversaries are very important milestones. Whether it’s a wedding anniversary or a business anniversary, neither should be overlooked. Both are meant to be celebrated!

Recognizing a wedding anniversary can be tricky business. In the personal realm, generally you are in fairly good contact with friends and/or family and know what’s happening in their personal life. This makes it much easier when sending a card or gift. However, since business may be a little more removed, you should be much more cautious if you plan to acknowledge wedding anniversaries. It wouldn’t look too good to send an anniversary card only to discover later that the marriage had ended.

For businesses, it is much safer to celebrate anniversaries related to the customer or employee relationships. Recognize customers for one or more years of doing business with your company. Or acknowledge the number of years an employee has been with you.

When choosing a gift to send, it’s okay to give something a little more personal for a wedding anniversary. Just be sure to give something that both the husband and wife would appreciate. For a business anniversary, you are better off to have a planned out award program based on years of service -especially for your employees. This will avoid any problems of one employee receiving something the perceive as less than what someone else received in the past. On the other hand, you have more flexibility with your customers. Gifts can be based on the volume of business a customer does with your company or any number of other factors.

Taking the time to take notice and make a big deal of both personal and business anniversaries will mean alot to both your customers and your employees… and will go a long way towards earning their appreciation and continued loyalty.
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About The Author:

Sally Liddicoat is a Wife, Mother, Speaker and the Founder & CEO of AttaBoy! Solutions. Her goal is to help businesses increase sales, generate ongoing referrals, strengthen relationships and create loyal customers and employees through appreciation marketing. Throughout this blog you can sign up for updates, news, special offers, discounts and more. So take a look around, leave a comment or two and enjoy.

Contact Sally

One of the biggest mistakes a company can make when dealing with their customers is to only look at the immediate effects of a decision and not take the long term effects into consideration. We all know that it can be very costly to earn the business of a single new customer. Once we have them, we need to keep them -almost at any cost.

Here’s what happened to my husband… About two years ago he purchased a hand sprayer for the yard. When he went to use it the other day, it was cracked and no longer working properly. He was about to throw it out when he noticed on the label “Lifetime Guarantee”. So… he called the company and the young lady on the phone told him that their return policy had changed and he needed his receipt. As you can imagine, he didn’t have it. After all it had been two years and it had only cost about $4 or $5 anyway. When he told her that he didn’t have the receipt she advised him to return the item to them and they would check it out -if it fit the criteria, they would send him out a new one.

Well, he needed a sprayer now -not a month or more from now. After the call he was a little frustrated and sent an email to the company explaining the situation. He also let them know that he was just going to go purchase another one, however it probably would not be their brand.

My husband, who is quite the handyman, is also pretty frugal so he tried to repair the broken sprayer and he was able to fix it. After about 4 days went by, he received an email from the company asking him to describe the damage to the sprayer. He sent a reply to their email with the information. About 2 days later he was notified that a new sprayer was being sent out.

Now that’s customer service! He has only ever bought one thing from this company and that was 2 years ago. But this company knows the value of a customer. It is far less expensive to send a new sprayer than to stick to their return policy. Why? Because now when my husband needs yard equipment, he will look for that brand. He has already told several people what the company has done for him and will continue to tell even more. The company also knows that for every person he tells his story to, he would have told twice as many had they enforced their policy and not satisfied their customer.

As difficult as it is to get new customers, it’s twice as hard to undo bad press. If people are going to talk about your company you want them telling good stories rather than bad. Your customers are what keeps you in business. Do what you need to do to keep them happy. Bend the rules sometimes, they are really more like guidelines anyway. By doing so, you will earn a customer for life.
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About The Author:

Sally Liddicoat is a Wife, Mother, Speaker and the Founder & CEO of AttaBoy! Solutions. Her goal is to help businesses increase sales, generate ongoing referrals, strengthen relationships and create loyal customers and employees through appreciation marketing. Throughout this blog you can sign up for updates, news, special offers, discounts and more. So take a look around, leave a comment or two and enjoy.

Contact Sally

As your appreciation grows for those you do business with, you are probably thinking, “I do a lot of business with whom ever. “What should I get them to show my appreciation?”

Your first thought is probably to get him or her something expensive and flamboyant, to make sure they know how much you appreciate them. Get that thought out of your head.  You should never give an expensive gift just to try to win points.  If you had a sale or wrote a contract for several  thousand or millions of dollars, sure an expensive gift would be great but that’s the only time.

Here are a couple great rules you can gift by:

• Check the policy of the company. For some companies it is totally a no-no to give their employees gifts. If that’s the case, respect their company’s rules. Send them a card or hand written thank you, it will mean a lot to them.

• Even if the company allows gifts, don’t go crazy. Expensive gifts make company representatives nervous. Many think that accepting a high-priced gift obligates them to continue doing business with you. There are many inexpensive yet very nice gifts that say “Thank You” without making them nervous.
• DO NOT send gifts with corporate logos (pens, coffee mugs, Post-It notes). They will remember who the gift is from without your company name screaming at them.

The best thing you can do is put some thought behind what you give. Give something you wouldn’t mind getting your self.  Don’t just grab any old thing and though you don’t want to spend a fortune, don’t be cheap either.  The quality of the gift you give says a lot about you and your company.  A good quality gift that you put thought into will say “We appreciate your business”.  Also, be sure you attach a nice card with it.
Following some simple, common sense guidelines for gift giving will take you a long way in both business and personal situations that call for gifts.
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About The Author:

	Mike Liddicoat is a Husband, Father, Speaker and the Sales & Marketing Director of AttaBoy! Solutions. His goal is to help businesses maintain relationships, ensure future business and acquire new referrals through appreciation marketing. Throughout this blog you can sign up for updates, news, special offers, discounts and more. So take a look around, leave a comment or two and enjoy.
Contact Mike