The most expensive thing you do in business is acquiring new customers and clients.

It takes a significant investment of time, thought, energy, and money to create new clients for your business.

Here’s an important fact: it’s nine times more expensive to create a new client than it is to sell to an existing client or customer. 

It’s far easier, cheaper, and more profitable to sell to your existing customers repeatedly than it is to go out and find new customers out of thin air every time you want to make a sale.

So, Ifgenerating more business and creating more revenue is a priority for you right now, the first place you should be looking is to your existing clientele – past and present. 

Here are four steps to make this happen, starting on a tactical level and moving more strategic: 

1 – You should have an email newsletter, going out once per month at minimum, with the objective of keeping your past and current clients engaged. Don’t let them forget about you.

2 – Call your past clients and customers to check in on them. Ask how they’re doing. Ask if there’s anything else you can do for them. You’ll be surprised by how often this leads to new business for you. Most importantly – systematize this process so that it happens regularly. 

3 – Treat your initial sale as the beginning of a long-term relationship with the client, not the end-point. Dan Kennedy says that you “shouldn’t find customers to make sales, instead you should make sales to get customers.” This is a major paradigm-shift. The initial engagement is only the beginning of the relationship.

Practically that means you need to capture contact information every time you make a sale, and continually market to each customer. It means structuring your products or services so that there’s a natural “ascension” over time. For example, if you’re an internet marketer, step one may be selling a new website. Step two may be upselling the client into ongoing monthly marketing. Step three may be inviting them to join a private mastermind group. 

4 – Fight for the attention of your clients and customers. In the internet age, it’s very likely that your customers and clients will run into other businesses that do the same thing you do. To keep them from wandering out of your herd and into someone else’s, you have to work hard to stay interesting and relevant. Become a thought leader. Develop an interesting and engaging brand. Hold events and create unique experiences for your clients. Motion is attractive in the marketplace – that’s how you hold attention, and that’s how you keep your clients and customers engaged.