Around this time of year, there’s a real danger of losing some of your clients.
A majority of small businesses are shutting down for the holidays – tying up loose ends so they can take some time off. Others are getting so busy that they can’t focus on anything other than running their business.
Either way, there’s a danger they won’t see the value in paying you over the Christmas season and leave your services.
The threat of losing clients often leaves coaches feeling helpless. But isn’t it inevitable? Afterall, you can’t stop Christmas from coming.
Other coaches feel like they have to scramble to hang on to their clients. If you lose too many, it’s bound to put a damper on the season.
The truth is, you don’t have to feel helpless and you don’t have to scramble. The first step to keep your clients is to change your mindset.
The Retention Mindset
There are two mindsets a coach can have about client management.
The first focuses on retention. When someone wants to hold on to their clients – to simply keep them, or retain them – their goal is not to lose clients.
So, when your main objective is not to lose clients, the best case scenario is that you hang on to them and keep them at the current status quo. That’s the very best you can hope for.
If all goes perfect, nothing changes, and hopefully it will all be okay.
When you have a retention mindset, the downside – the alternative to meeting your goal – is losing a client.
The Recommitment Mindset
Instead of focusing on retainment – not losing a client – we need to focus on recommitment.
This is a much bigger game. It’s proactive, not reactive. In a recommitment mindset, you’re after more than keeping your clients. You’re trying to get clients think about their future in a positive way and get excited about continuing to work with you over the next year.
I recently had a session with a lady who’s been coaching me over the last three months. It was the last session of our contract, and at the end, I said, “This is awesome and I want to do it again. I’m gonna be away for a bit over Christmas, but let’s kick back off on January 20th. Here are the goals I want to hit…”
She just had a client step up and recommit to smashing it with her next year. That’s what we’re after when we have the recommitment mindset.
If you aim for recommitment and come up short, what happens?
Retention, right? The fallback when you’re shooting for recommitment is that things stay the way they were and you still hang on to the client.
But, 70 to 80 percent of the time, clients won’t just stay on with you. They’ll get more excited, recommit, and reposition themselves with you. When they do this, they don’t take you for granted! They don’t undervalue, underpay, or overuse you.
We don’t want to focus on retainment. We need to focus on recommitment.
Coming up next on the blog, we’ll look at a key tool to get your clients to recommit to your coaching for next year.
I’d love to hear your thoughts on this. Comment below.
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