Ryan Dohrn shares customer retention strategies: spend 30 minutes daily on it, send handwritten thank-you notes with $5 Starbucks cards, and make referrals for clients. Existing customers are 5 times more likely to repurchase, so treat retention as core sales work, not an afterthought.
Questions this video answers
Allocate at least 30 minutes each day to retention activities and act on every active account weekly or monthly. Avoid generic check‑in emails. Use handwritten thank‑you notes with a $5 Starbucks gift card, send personalized gifts through sugarwish.com, mail non‑religious holiday cards (St. Patty’s, Valentine’s, Thanksgiving) with small themed items, and focus on making referrals for your clients. These above‑and‑beyond actions differentiate retention from basic customer service and dramatically increase the chance of repeat business.
Chapters
Hey friends and fans, Ryan Dohrn here answering your listener questions sent in to ryan@ryandohrn.com. All right, next listener question comes from Marty in Nevada. Hey Marty. Hey Ryan, I'm wondering about your best retention ideas. You talk about retention being a part of every salesperson's sales day. Yes, I do. So what are some of your best retention ideas? So Marty from Nevada, a really, really great question. Okay, so what I typically try to do is allocate at least 30 minutes every day to retention activities. I'm going to go into my CRM, I'm going to pull up my active accounts, and I'm going to do something to each of those active accounts, usually at least once a week, every couple of weeks, at a minimum once a month. Now let me tell you, Marty, what I'm not going to do from a retention perspective: send emails checking in on people. I don't know if air quotes are required. Checking in on people. What I am going to do though is be strategic about my retention strategy because all research tells me that you're 5 times more likely to close on somebody that's already done business with you. As a matter of fact, it's 60 to 70% more likely. I mean, the likelihood is very, very high. So here's my best ideas. The easiest ones are handwritten thank-you notes. Now I know what you're saying, okay, Ryan, you're 51 years old, okay, people don't write notes to each other anymore. Exactly, and that's why it works. So what I do is I typically write a handwritten thank you note. I don't have company stationery or anything like that. I go to Starbucks at a non-busy time. I buy like $100 worth of $5 gift cards, write a little thank you note to somebody and say, hey, have a cup of coffee on me. Now, someone the other day criticized me and said, I got a client that's spending $100 grand with me and you're gonna send them a $5 Starbucks card? Okay, well, send them $100. I, you know, I don't care. I think it's the small things though, friends, that really, really matter. Now, don't confuse retention with customer service. Retention is the things you do above and beyond the call of duty to keep a customer for a lifetime. Customer service is expected. So handwritten notes with $5 Starbucks cards in them. One of my favorite retention activities comes from a company called sugarwish.com. Sugar, just like S-U-G-A-R, wish, W-I-S-H, sugarwish.com. What sugarwish.com lets you do is you can send a sugar wish to one of your customers. Then what they do is they log into the portal, and based on what you spent, they can— they won't see that, but the customer of yours gets to pick cookies or dog treats or tea or coffee or wine or whatever the circumstance is, and they can order it and it is delivered to them in a custom-designed box. Box with your company logo on it and things like that. So I love sugarwish.com. Another thing that I do from a retention perspective is I get cards related to non-religious holidays. So for example, I might send out a card to my clients on St. Patty's Day with a little four-leaf clover in it. And yes, you can buy lucky four-leaf clovers on Amazon. I'll do something for Valentine's Day where I'll send those little boxes of Valentine's, little like little sugary things, little hearts. Send that to my advertisers. You might say, oh, so childish. You know, I represent a high-end product. It's not childish. It's called having fun. And some of you need to have a little bit of fun that's out there. So I follow the non-religious holiday calendar. Now you might say, whoa, Ryan, why— what, what's this non-religious thing? Well, there's no reason to put any type of, like, if you will, controversy inside of your retention plan. But what I can tell you is this. One of the things that I don't do is I don't send Christmas cards. Now, I'm a Merry Christmas kind of guy and I'm all about the Christmas holidays, right? And however you celebrate that holiday season, rock on with your bad self. It's awesome. It's a great time of year, but everybody sends stuff that time of year. So I would be a much bigger fan of being thankful on Thanksgiving. I'm a real big proponent of sending gifts and thanks around that time of the holiday season, around Thanksgiving. But friends, it's all the little things that you do. Now, one of the best things you can do from a retention perspective is refer business. Asking your customers, what— who could I refer to you? Who would be helpful to you? What's your perfect customer look like? Let me refer business to you. Friends, if you're going to be a retention machine, referrals— bringing referrals to your customers is one of the best ways to get great ROI on everything that you do in the sales business. So when you think through this, Marty from Nevada, I hope there's some good ideas. But the biggest thing is dedicate time to retention because you are 5 times more likely to re-sign somebody that you've already got. And part of that, it's not just customer service. A lot of it is doing the extra things, going above and beyond the call of duty to keep that customer around for a lifetime. Friends, never forget, if sales was easy, everybody'd be doing it. And they're not. We're not Maybe we're a little crazy. This is a great career. It'll feed your family for a lifetime. Hey, love to come and speak at your national sales meeting. Come and pump your team up. Reach out to me over at ryandohrn.com. All right, friends, we'll see you next week.
