In this video, Jermaine Edwards presents three actionable customer retention strategies aimed at helping businesses keep their best customers. The first strategy, "Killing Curiosity," encourages companies to become the primary source of market information for their customers, even if that information benefits competitors, by having honest, transparent conversations about industry trends and technologies. The second strategy, "Stay Close to Your Stakeholders," stresses the importance of identifying and engaging not only top‑level decision makers but also the entire chain of influencers, owners, buyers, and end‑users within a client organization, and establishing feedback loops to monitor those relationships. The third strategy, "Audit Your Customer Conversations," proposes a weekly review framework that asks three questions: (1) did the interaction move the relationship forward, (2) did it make the customer a better client, and (3) does it build confidence that you are the partner of choice. Edwards supplies a PDF guide covering each strategy and urges viewers to apply these habits to become trusted advisors and reduce churn.
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Hey, it's Jermaine Edwards, your customer growth guide. If you are new, welcome back. If you are old, welcome back to the fold. In this specific video, we're going to talk about 3 retention strategies so you can stop stressing and start retaining more customers. Number 1: Killing curiosity. Killing curiosity is all about becoming the place where your customer comes for new information, not because they can't get it somewhere else, but because you share it with them first, even if it doesn't mean your company gets the business. And that might seem counterintuitive to you, but just take products and services and companies like Google or Amazon. Now, are they actually providing all of the services and all the products and so forth? No, they've become the platform that you choose first to go to find information. It doesn't mean they're less loyal to you. It means you trust them so much that you're willing to go, to go to them for competitive information and not just information about the services that they own themselves. That is a unique and powerful place to be. So how do you become somebody who kills curiosity? Well, it begins with this. Have more honest conversations with your customers. Don't be afraid to tell them what's out there. I don't mean name competitors. I mean, talk to them about the things that's happening in your marketplace. Talk to them about, hey, new technologies that are out there. Talk to them about some of these things that they may see outside of your own organization. Don't be afraid of that. Now, they're gonna find out anyway. So you be the person that they come to for that information and you'll be the trusted source for them. That's killing curiosity. Number 2, stay close to your stakeholders. And I don't just mean the ones at the top. I mean stakeholders that influence all kinds of decision-making within your customer's organization. And so how do we begin to do this proactively and at scale to stay close to those stakeholders? Well, one, you have to identify who those stakeholders are. For your specific business product and service. Every product and service you have will have an owner, a buyer, an influencer, users, and even multi-end users— people who use it, then use it for other people, then those people use it for other people, and so forth and so forth. So you need to decide what that chain of stakeholder analysis looks like. Never negate the fact that even those at the lower level of those influencing pyramids can still sabotage your success as a company, particularly if that person is a favorite employee to the person who buys the product. You have no idea the dynamics of these relationships. So the first thing you need to do is simply audit where all those stakeholders are and ask yourself, how are we communicating with that group? How are we communicating with that group? How are we supporting that group? And how are they feeding back to us about our relationship with that group? So how are we communicating to that group? How are we supporting that group? And how are we allowing them to communicate back to us on the relationship with that group? If you can have a mechanism for feeding into that loop, you will no longer be sabotaged or thrown off course when somebody says something that might counter— be be counterintuitive to what you might believe about that customer. You can always have ears to the ground, but requires you doing some work and thinking about that chain of stakeholders within your customer's business. So that's number 2, stay close to your stakeholders. Number 3 is audit your customer conversations. Now you're speaking with your customers every day via email, phone, virtual conference, in meetings, all kinds of mechanisms and channels of communication. Here's the problem. Often at the end of the week, we look at our goals as according to what the business is asking us to do, or maybe what the customer is asking us to do. But we don't audit the things that really matter in that moment for that particular week. And there are 3 things I want you to audit about your customer conversations every week. The first is, have you moved the relationship forward? Have the conversations you've had actually moved your relationship forward? And if so, how would you know? How would you evaluate what that is? If you don't, don't worry about it. I'm going to tell you how in just a second. But have you done that? Have you asked yourself the question? Have you thought about if the conversations have actually moved your relationship forward? Number 2, has it created a better customer? Meaning, are there some things about your customer, with your customer relationship, that have actually improved? So now they're actually a much better customer to you, and you're a better partner to them. Has that happened? And that could be something as simple as, hey, are they paying you better this, this month now because of all the things you've been talking about? Are they becoming a better customer? That's really important to know. The last thing here, and perhaps one of the most interesting questions you could ask yourself, is, is the relationship that you have with your contact building confidence with the business that you are a partner of choice? Is the relationship you're building with the contacts bringing confidence to the business that you are still the partner of choice? Now again, all these questions are really helpful, but if you're not auditing these conversations regularly, intermittently, with yourself, with your customer, with your business, it's likely you're falling into an assumptions trap and you're believing something is real when it really isn't. And that's a dangerous place to be. So in order for you to become a true advisor your customer never wants to leave, those are 3 starting retention strategies, principles that build in the process and the habits that allow you to stay healthy, focused, and proactive with your customer so you can always be ready to respond to the needs that they have and to ensure you meet your goals. So those are the 3 retention strategies I want to speak to you— I want to speak to you on. I've got a PDF for you to walk through each of these different areas, from killing curiosity to stakeholders to auditing your conversations, so you can win immediately this week with your customers. Remember to like and subscribe if you found this video of value to you, and I'll see you in the next video.
