Episode 185 – How to Handle and Keep Your Customers

Custom Apparel Startups

Episode 185 – How to Handle and Keep Your Customers

This Episode

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Mark Stephenson & Marc Vila

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customapparelstartups.com

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CAS Podcast

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ColDesi

You Will Learn

• How to organize customer information and stay in contact with customers
• Why established policies and procedures are important, and when to bend the rules
• Why sometimes it’s best to fire a customer

Resources & Links

• Colman and Company Blog
• ColDesi Learning Center
• Leasing Equipment

Episode 185 – How to Handle and Keep Your Customers

Show Notes

Working with many customers can be very challenging, especially when it’s repeat customers.

Some customers are very needy, others are poor at communication, others don’t pay on time.

So how do you handle all these different types of customers when you are trying to run your business YOUR way? You want to keep your best customers happy, so they come back!

Get a CRM

This is key. You need a way to organize all your information, contacts, notes, reminders, invoices.

Set Reminders

Be sure to have reminders for ANYTHING important. Remind customer to get you the art, Remind that a bill is due. Remind to follow up on approval for production.

If you can set up automated reminders to email / text them… even better.

Use your calendar

Every meeting needs a calendar meeting (invite the customer too)

Use Calendly to avoid those “are you available at XYZ time/day” emails

Block out time for work. Invoicing, production, etc.

Have policies and procedures

You cannot force your customers to do everything your way, but you sure can suggest it. Many people will comply to your procedures. And YOU can decide which rules are ok to bend and not.

Fire customers

Yes, it’s HARD to say no to money but there is a price for your time, effort and stress. If one customer is preventing you from growing or enjoying your business, it’s time to let them go.

Be Friendly

You catch more flies with honey. People will like you. People will adhere to your reminders, people will respect your calendar invites, people will follow your procedures and you will have enough customers to be able to fire the bad ones.

Transcript

Mark Stephenson:
Hey everyone. Welcome to episode 185 of the Custom Apparel Startups podcast. Wait a minute, Episode 185 of the Custom Apparel Startups podcast. It’s been that long. I can’t even say it properly anymore that we’ve did the last episodes, but this is Mark Stephenson from ClientsFIRST Marketing.

Marc Vila:
All right, and that’s utter confusion there. So this is Marc Vila from ColDesi, and for those of you who’ve listened to this before, then maybe Mark Stephenson will explain what he means about that. For anyone who this is their first time listening. I apologize for Mark Stephenson’s antics ahead of time, but there’s some really good content coming up in probably about a minute or two.

Mark Stephenson:
It could be. So for those of you that have been listening for a while, I’m no longer officially with ColDesi. I’ve got my own marketing company that I’ve been doing on the side for quite a while, and we’ve talked about that freely in podcasts in the past. It’s how I’ve been able to bring some outside perspective into the customer apparel business. And I’m just doing that full time now, but that’s not going to change what happens here on the podcast. So I’m excited to keep going forward just with a slightly new introduction.

Marc Vila:
All right, well great. I love it and I’m excited to hear some more things you have to tell us in other episodes. But Mark is going to continue to participate in Custom Apparel Startups podcast for many episodes. We’re also going to have a lot of other guests from ColDesi from outside of ColDesi I hope as well. So guests are welcome. If you’re interested in being a guest and you have something good to offer, please reach out. But we’ve got a bunch of cool stuff on the line. But today we’ve got something particularly interesting and it has to do with some of Mark’s recent experience, but also just in general, some things that we’ve researched and known over the years from talking to plenty of customers, how to handle and keep your customers.

Mark Stephenson:
Yeah. And especially during that transition when you’ve only got 10 customers, 12, 15 customers, 20 customers, if you’re really smart, if you’ve only got that number of customers, then it’s really not too hard to keep everybody straight, to keep all the orders because you know everyone, you remember doing the quote, you’ve got an easy job management kind of thing because there’s not that many customers to deal with and not that many orders, but that really changes completely once you start to scale up and add, whether it’s customer number 11 for you or customer number 50 for you, whatever marks that transition in your business from something that you can wrap your head around easily to, you can no longer wrap your head around it easily. That’s the point that we’re talking about.

Marc Vila:
Yeah. And actually it is when you reach that point and you, it’s too late once you’ve reached it because when you reach that point and you’re no longer organized, you’re forgetting things, you’re leaving clients behind, you’re probably going to lose a client at that point in time when you realize, Oh my gosh, I can’t believe I missed this meeting. I missed a deadline. I forgot to follow up. I forgot to order. Just because you have too much stuff going on, you may have very well lost a client. So that’s one reason why it’s too late. The second reason why it’s too late is now you’re a little bit over busy, you’re having a hard time keeping up. You’re between just the mess of how you’re keeping everything and inside your brain, you can’t keep up. Then you decide you want to find some solutions, which we’ll talk about, and you’ve got to learn how to use those potentially, or write them or make them or whatever it might be. So you’ve just added more workload to your already-.

Mark Stephenson:
Yeah. And it’s not just that, and it’s, you still have to enter in everything that’s happened. You still have to, it’s not like you can just say, Okay, I’m only going to systemize things from the last customer forward. No, you’ve got to include those original customers and those original deals and everything in whatever organizational style that you adopt or software that you pick.

Marc Vila:
Yeah, absolutely. And I thought your audio drop, but I think it was me, for some reason I lowered my speakers. But anyway, if the audio did drop, I apologize.

Mark Stephenson:
Okay, thanks.

Marc Vila:
But I think we’re good. So this is essentially what we’re talking about here is you’re working with a lot of customers, it gets very challenging, some customers are going to be needy, some customers are going to communicate poorly, some are not going to pay on time. There’s going to be a lot of different things you’re dealing with and it’s not when you have a system like an eCommerce store where you’re taking individual orders consistently and maybe you don’t have a lot of repeat customers, you have people buying T-shirts of something that is hot or trending at the time and you may never see them again. That’s different than managing a book of clients like if you have schools, businesses, sports teams that you want to depend on them over time, they potentially could be, each of those clients could be five, 10, 20, 30% of your business when you take them up and if you say, you have 20 or 30 clients and things start getting messy, and you start making mistakes, it’s too late.

So here are some things that you can do to help handle all those clients, keep those customers, and overall just make your business better.

Mark Stephenson:
Yep, that’s true. And we’ve done a bunch of episodes on this in the past. I think one of the first ones that you want to take a look at is a CRM. That’s where we’re going to start. Right, Marc?

Marc Vila:
Yep. That’s the first thing to start, and we’ve talked about this a bunch, but a CRM, a customer relationship manager software. Essentially it’s just a piece of software where if you know what this is, great, if not, you should jump out and google and find one. But it’s a piece of software that is on notes and all the information about your customers.

Mark Stephenson:
If you think about it, if you are on the phone with a customer and you open up a spiral binder or legal pad or notepad or whatever, and you ask the customer for their information, everything that you write down is exactly what you would type into a CRM. The difference is, instead of flipping back through a book to try to find your notes, if it’s all typed into a CRM, if you remember their last name, you can type in their last name and search for it. If you tag them properly and know everybody they were interested in sweatshirts, then you could type in sweatshirt and that customer would pop up. So at the intake point, it’s super important to have something like a CRM, especially because this is where it all starts. And it’s also something where if you got it, you would load up all your existing customers in it as well.

Marc Vila:
So it’s a modern day Rolodex if you’re old school and you’ve been around for a while and you had a Rolodex or a book full of business cards, it’s a modern day version of that, that does so much more than just store phone numbers. So one of the keys to get from the very beginning is to get some sort of CRM. You can get a free one, it doesn’t have to cost you money in the very beginning if you don’t have the money or you don’t want to invest in one yet. If you do have the ability to invest a little bit of money, not too much, just a little bit of money every month. What do you think is a reasonable cost for a good CRM monthly?

Mark Stephenson:
So it really depends on what you want. So a very basic CRM, you can get into Zoho or something similar for 20 to 50 bucks a month if you want to go paid. The client’s first CRM, which is one that I’m customizing for the custom T-shirt business is going to be a lot more for a more advanced CRM that does more things, you’re going to expect to pay between 70 and a hundred bucks a month, but by far you don’t have to start with that. But it depends on the functionality that you’re looking for.

Marc Vila:
So step one would be free basic.

Mark Stephenson:
Yep.

Marc Vila:
Do that 100%, find a free one. Many of them will let you have up to a hundred or 250 or more customers for a hundred percent for free. You have to do that minimum.

Mark Stephenson:
And first, let me interject, don’t get analysis paralysis here. Find one that looks easy to use and get it because they’re all very transferable. So just find something, don’t spend your whole life, don’t use that as an excuse not to get started. Just get started, pick one and get started and start typing stuff in.

Marc Vila:
Yep, that’s great. And the next level up would be find an entry level one where you’re going to pay 20, 30 bucks a month, something like that. You will see that you’re going to get more features like that. And the next level up is going to be a higher level one, which is something like Mark mentioned and the client’s first one. And that is going to do things like, it’s going to already have things like automated text messaging or going from sale to invoice and you can move things around.

Mark Stephenson:
And you add workflows in there, all kinds of stuff as you grow. But a lot of the stuff that we’re going to talk about next is also included in many CRMs.

Marc Vila:
Yes. And even in many of the freebies. Of course-.

Mark Stephenson:
Absolutely.

Marc Vila:
… read the feature list, but at minimum get a free CRM at bare minimum because it’s really going to help you out because by the time you wish you did it, it’s going to be too late and then you’re going to have to backfill the information and you’re already staying up too late printing T-shirts.

Mark Stephenson:
Let me just interject something about your workflow now because this is a really important step in picking that next step in your business, is when you get a phone call or when you get an email, rather than relying on that pad next to you, you’re going to keep your CRM open and that’s where you’re going to take all your notes. That’s where you’re going to do your intake. This is now a substitute for your pad and paper next to your desk. So if you engage in that discipline, it will be a very easy transfer from using a pen and paper to just typing it in on your computer.

Marc Vila:
That’s great. That’s where you put in that, the customer hates polyester shirts because they’re allergic, things like that. Okay, so that’s great. The next thing that’s going to be important to do to keep your clients, keep yourself happy, is to set reminders. And I think this is such an obvious thing and shouldn’t even be said, but if anything important needs to happen, remind a customer to get our remind to pick something up, remind to drop something off. Anything that’s really important and critical, you should set a reminder for, and I mean electronically in your phone, in your CRM, wherever it might be, you need to make sure you get reminded to do things because as you get busy and you’re running around embroidery machines and you’re running around client phone calls from noon to three o’clock is going to fly by super fast and you needed to drop something off at UPS by 2:00 PM and you missed it. So reminders are huge.

Mark Stephenson:
I think that this is, and it combines with what’s next, which is using your calendar and setting your calendar reminders as well. I think that one of the things that have saved me in the past month of going fully into the marketing business is having a single calendar with reminders set, because there’s been times, and especially when you’re doing the work yourself, if you are the one that’s printing the T-shirts and at the heat press and everything, sometimes if I don’t get a reminder that I’ve got to make a phone call or I have a meeting or something in 10 minutes, then I’m just going to write blog posts right through that time period. And I’m not, because I’m careful about interruptions, I’m not going to see my phone, I’m not going to get any of that, but I will get a calendar reminder pop up on my laptop while I’m working.

Marc Vila:
Yeah. I’ll tell you-.

Mark Stephenson:
Or if I’ve got the CRM open on my phone, I will get a notification that way as well.

Marc Vila:
Yeah, I do the same. If I’m really trying to concentrate on something, especially working on a spreadsheet, doing art, you and I write articles, writing an article, it very well could be something a little bit more technical and important in our industry, you’re lining up vinyl for T-shirts, you don’t want to be constantly picking up your phone, looking at things, checking the time because you’re concentrating lining those things up. You’re in the zone, you got some flow going on, getting production done, it’s going to be important that you have a reminder with a specific sound, that sound means I should probably stop what I’m doing and check.

Mark Stephenson:
Hey listen, just imagine that you had a personal assistant that if you imagine you’re on the phone and you do a quote and the customer says, I’m going to think about it a little bit, I need to order by Wednesday. If you don’t hear from me, give me a call back Wednesday morning. So imagine you just type in your notes and you set a reminder inside your CRM, or inside your calendar somewhere. It’s like having a personal assistant. You say, here’s everything I have to do, come tap me on the shoulder when it’s time for me to do that.

Marc Vila:
Yeah. Yeah.

Mark Stephenson:
And that’s exactly what it’s like, if you can’t afford that, then use a CRM and use your calendar, because it’s literally the same thing. It’s definitely I’m super productive now because I definitely focus on the task at hand until the bell rings and I see what I’m supposed to be doing next, and there’s no way you’re going to remember that somebody has this event every year and you need to call them in April 1st next year. There’s just no way. So definitely the setting reminders thing is important.

Marc Vila:
Yep. I think it’s great if you have a iPhone or an Android phone of some sorts, Samsung, something like that, they’re going to have built in reminder apps in the software. So if you don’t know how to use those and you would like to do it on your mobile device, just go to YouTube and search how to use iPhone reminders and there’ll be a video to learn how to do it and boom, you’ll be a pro in a couple minutes and just start throwing things in there. Also, between, well Siri is for iPhone, do you have one for your phone? Your Samsung?

Mark Stephenson:
Google.

Marc Vila:
Google. Hey Google. Okay.

Mark Stephenson:
Yeah, that’s it.

Marc Vila:
You can just say it and it will do it, which is cool too.

Mark Stephenson:
I would do it on the way to work. I would set reminders for when I arrived at work and it would do it by location to remind you.

Marc Vila:
Yep, I do that plenty. I do it in my personal life a lot because of work. So I’ll say, remind me when I get to Lowe’s to also get air filters. And because I’m driving and it just popped in my head and you can use your voice to do it too. So there’s never an excuse as long as you actually set them, it’s really important.

Mark Stephenson:
And I’ll expand that into the calendar area too and also mention this CRM stuff again. And that is if you think reminders that are going to be valuable for you, whether it’s integrated into a calendar or not, they’re just as valuable if you can remind your customers of things. So you can actually set, remind me to follow up with John on April 3rd about this job. You can also send an automated text message or email on that day, every April for the rest of my life, John’s going to get an email from me on Wednesday at 8:00 AM, Hey are you still doing that T-shirt order? And you are just going to get business because that happens.

Marc Vila:
Absolutely. Absolutely. I’ll tell you, and if you have Amazon, Walmart, any of these apps, CVS, they will tell you when it’s time for you to get something else again. And they get so much business because of that.

Mark Stephenson:
Yeah.

Marc Vila:
I’ll just say, you’re probably running low on this, I’ll get those emails and stuff from Amazon and I’ll say, I probably am. I don’t even know if I am. I’ll just going to order it so I don’t run out. And then I go ahead and get that. So it’s fantastic if you could do that. And yeah, it’s just another little thing. So go into the next one on the list and since you mentioned it, Mark, is using a calendar. So talk about how important that is. And again, this is obvious and I hate to preach to the choir to folks, but so many people don’t use a calendar, and tell us how important it is.

Mark Stephenson:
So even internally at ColDesi, there were a few higher ups that did not spend all day on their emails like Marc and I did. But they just were like, hey, let’s meet at two and that would be it. Where with, I would immediately fill out a calendar invitation for a meeting at 2:00 PM and I would invite everyone that was supposed to be at the meeting so it wouldn’t be a run around the building go, Hey is Bob here right now? We’re supposed to have a meeting. Steve said to… It was time and all of that stuff. It’s super important if it’s your own paycheck that’s on the line, if it’s your own business on the line, that not just you but your customers know and have a reinforcement and a commitment to when you’re supposed to get together. So if you have got a call on that Wednesday with Bob about the next T-shirt job, then don’t leave it at just exchanging emails, say I’m going to call you. If you send them a calendar invitation and they hit yes, they’ve done a couple of things.

First of all, they’ve committed to you that they’re going to be there and that they are available. That’s a mental and emotional commitment to availability. And the second thing is not only are you going to get the reminder on your calendar, but they’re going to get the reminder on their calendar when they hit accept. So everybody’s going to get notified, everybody knows when it is, there’s no excuses, you get notified in advance as a reminder, you are now in a place where those five customers that you used to have, you could keep track in your friends and you can give them a hard time if they don’t show up. 75 customers, 50 customers, you can’t manage your days like that. Just from a customer interaction perspective, you’ve got to use a calendar system to schedule meetings, make sure everybody’s on the same page.

Marc Vila:
Yep. So at any time that you can get a time from a customer and when to show up, be there, meet somewhere, be on the phone, whatever it is, you definitely want it on your calendar and it’s really great to get it on theirs, because it’s going to remind them and they’re going to feel obligated as well too, which they should be because they told you. But they’ll even more obligated when they pick up their phone and especially if you have an iPhone, something like that. When I wake up in the morning, my little calendar widget tells me that I have something happening at 10:00 AM, but I went to check the time and in the corner I saw meeting with Mark Stephenson at 10:00 AM and then immediately my mind shifts, Oh yeah I have that meeting. Am I prepared for it. Let me double check all that stuff. So that’ll be great. Go ahead.

Mark Stephenson:
I was just going to say, and the other use for a calendar and meetings in particular is as part of the sales process. So if you do a quote you can get a commitment from the customer on when you’re going to follow up on it. I’m going to put this in my calendar, I’m just going to invite you so you’ll know I’m going to call to follow up and see where you are.

Marc Vila:
Yep. And there’s lots of things you can do in those calendar invites depending on the situation. So you can remind people 15 minutes before is usually when most things default to, but you can add second or third reminders to those as well. Remind people hours before, or a day before if they should be preparing something ahead of time for you. For example, getting the size of shirts for everybody in their office, because you’re going to come and you’re going to finalize the order and you’re going to want to have the list. So you could in that reminder of when you’re coming on Wednesday morning, you can hit, I’m sorry, in the calendar invite you could put remind 24 hours before and they’ll get a reminder that says on their phone or their email that says tomorrow so and so get the sizes. And it’s all in the calendar invite. So one thing I was going to say about calendars are there’s calendar apps. Right now probably the hot one is Calendly.

Mark Stephenson:
Yep.

Marc Vila:
It’s a paid serve. I think they have free stuff but they don’t give you much unless you pay. And it’s I think 10 or 20 bucks a month. It’s not too expensive. I think 20. And what this is, is you can sync up your personal calendar and your work calendar and all that stuff in there and all of that’s only visible to you, but you can send somebody a link and it will show them the times you’re available. That’s great for those times when you are trying to coordinate meeting with somebody and you’re consistently getting, I’m busy then, I’m busy then. Nope, I’m busy then, I’m busy then. You can send them a link and they’ll be able to click on it and it will show a virtual calendar for you with the time slot that you have available and they can click and pick one right there if they want to and take that spot.

Mark Stephenson:
I’ll tell you, and you’ve probably used Calendly maybe without even knowing it, but I just finished a podcast series for attorneys on paid advertising and every time I get an email from one of them, there’s a suggestion for a Calendly link, like book a time on my calendar and you click and you can see the calendar, you can pick the time that you’re available and it avoids that back and forth. The other thing is that a good CRM will also have this built in. So you know can use the calendar inside your CRM and you can have the same kind of functionality. But I really like the note that you put in here and how to manage your not online time with your calendar as well. Blocking out time for other things.

Marc Vila:
Yeah, I block out probably at least eight hours a week minimum every single week on a rolling thing to make sure, for one, it’s a little bit of a reminder for me to check stuff. So I block something for social media and during that time it pops up on my phone and whatever I was distracted with before I say okay let me just go check that. And I go and I check and I make sure some of those things are updated and I get it done. It also prevents somebody from looking at my calendar and thinking that I’m all free all the time for everybody, because I’m not, and you shouldn’t be either.
So if you normally do embroidery work every Tuesday and Thursday morning from eight to 11, specifically you block that time for that reason, for many reasons probably, whatever all the reasons are, like there’s no kids around, you never have this, whatever there are, you booked them then. And if you start booking calls during that slot, you could probably take a call at a different time. But that embroidery slot’s there for a specific period of time. So if you had that, you should put those in your calendar, block them out. For one that’s great for Calendly or your CRM because people won’t be able to book that slot, and it will remind you that nope, Thursday morning I’m doing embroidery. Sorry.

Mark Stephenson:
Yeah, you’ll get that reminder. As a matter of fact, personally I just did this because I walk in the mornings three or four days a week depending on the weather, and it’s usually at seven now that it’s light again. But what was happening was I was also doing LinkedIn posts every day. So I would just get up in the morning as I usually do and I’d start working on a post and then all of a sudden it would be 7:30 or eight o’clock because I just kept going, I just kept working and then it was too late to accomplish what I had set out to do. So now when I wake up 10 minutes before I’m supposed to go for a walk, I actually get the calendar link and I have doing my that other stuff, the LinkedIn post, things like that set for later on in the day. So it’s a great way to mix not just your professional life but your personal life as well.

Marc Vila:
Yeah, and I’ll put, speaking of personal life stuff, you put in there, if your kids have soccer game, baseball game, if you want to take your significant other out for an anniversary dinner, you can block those in there too and block out shopping time, it’s great if you fill up that calendar for one, it’s definitely going to help with your business, it’s going to keep your customers happy and it’s also going to allow you to balance your life-.

Mark Stephenson:
Yeah, I’ll say too, last thing on that is it will give you an actual realistic look at your availability and your week. So if you have to pick up your kid from school at 2:30 Monday through Friday and it takes you 45 minutes, if that’s not on the calendar, you might look at your day and say, look at all this time that I’ve got, but you know you’ve got to leave at 2:15. It takes you 15 minutes to get there, 15 minutes to pick them up, 15 minutes to get back, 35 minutes to get them all settled. So you’re really not available to work even to schedule stuff for yourself to do during that time period. It may even give you the opportunity to look at your priorities and align your work schedule to fit.

Marc Vila:
And all this is just really good stuff. The calendars and the reminders are so key and if you’re listening to this saying I already do that, I would implore you to go through and actually look at your calendar and look at your reminders and see how often you aren’t using it. And if you’re not, if you add stuff in there, you’re going to be happy.

Mark Stephenson:
So back to that transition between being able to keep everybody in your head and growing and still retaining your customers, having policies and procedures that you put down here, Marc, is a life saver because you’re setting up rules in advance in how you’re going to conduct your business and how your customers are going to conduct their business with you.

Marc Vila:
So a policy and a procedure for your business might be you don’t accept blank goods from customers, you only provide the blanks. It might be that all artwork needs to be submitted a minimum of 48 hours before production. It might be that nobody can just call your cell phone and you’ll answer it and help them. Whatever it might be. And you have your own reasons for doing whatever those policies and procedures are. But if you need to sit down and consider what are things you’re willing and not willing to do for and with your customers, and why you’re doing it. Okay. So if you don’t want to do it because you don’t like it, that’s fair. There’s having a business that you enjoy doing with things the way you like to do it is good, but more importantly it’s going to be the reason that you do it is to prevent issues.

So you say you require art to be submitted 48 hours before production is going to start. So maybe you give them a date, you have to submit here if you want your product to be done by here, if you submit a day later, I move it out a day. Well, why do you have that? Because you know that there’s probably a 50/50 shot that there’s going to be a problem with the art. You’re going to have to change something, you’re going to have to get a second approval from them. So they’re going to submit something, you’re going to fix it, you’re going to have to send it back to them, they’re going to have to approve it, then you’re going to send it back again and you go in this circle. And you know that, that process can take a day or two. So you prepare that and you have this that you communicate this to your customers.

Mark Stephenson:
And I also like this, especially in that transition point because it may be that you knew your first 10 customers and you’re very friendly so everybody just gets along and they understand the business and the relationship. But when you get somebody new that doesn’t know you personally, or maybe wasn’t a referral or something like that, they’re used to doing business with other people, you’ve got to have parameters set because they may not be prepared for the idea that, you may want to collect 10 or 20% in advance before you build the order, where you wouldn’t do that for somebody that you’ve done business with for 10 years.
You may want to make sure it’s written down and they know it’ll be 10 days unless there’s a rush fee, where for your first customers they would just call you up and you’d be like, Oh yeah, I have time to worry about it. Well now it’s different because you’ve got 30 customers, you can’t do that. So you’ve really got to look at not just where you are right now, but in six months, if I have X number of customers, what do my policies and procedures have to be? And that will smooth that transition a lot. It’ll save you a lot of heartache if you’ve got it all in writing.

Marc Vila:
Yeah. And honestly it’s your fault if you don’t have a procedure for something and you don’t communicate that to your customers, and then you can’t deliver on time or whatever it is that makes them a dissatisfied customer, essentially it’s your fault because you didn’t let them know how should they know? How should they know this? Why should they know this? And if you didn’t communicate that, then they have a little bit of a right to be bothered by that and maybe not come back. However, if you communicate, I have to have my art, you have to have the art by this time and they submit it three days later and then they ask you why it’s going to be late?
They may still have some dissatisfaction, but when you discuss with them say listen, I told you it was here. I sent you a reminder via email, I had a thing on my calendar to check on it. I called you and left you a message to check on it, and then three days later you got back with me. I’m trying my hardest to help you. This is what I can do for you, this is what I can’t. And if the customer is not going to say you’re right and admit it and then move on, you probably don’t want them as a customer anyway, because they’re going to be terrible all the time.

Mark Stephenson:
And that rolls right into the… That was a great setup by the way. Congratulations. That was great. That rolls right into the next thing, which is all about firing all your customers.

Marc Vila:
Fire all, maybe not all of them.

Mark Stephenson:
But your job would be easier.

Marc Vila:
It would be much easier. What you want to do is you don’t want to be a slave to your customers. You don’t want to be subservient to them constantly. This is, the relationship should be balanced. You want to have a good business that is successful, that grows to the point where it hits the limit you want to hit, and that you’re satisfied being an owner of this business, because if you wanted a job you hated, you can go get one of those. That’s easy. Those are the easiest jobs to get.

Mark Stephenson:
Let people work for Amazon.

Marc Vila:
Yeah, I have no clue if that’s a good job or not.

Mark Stephenson:
No, me neither. I have a suspicion.

Marc Vila:
I have a suspicion. I do know that there, it’s easy to get the jobs that nobody wants to have. Owning your own business is challenging. It’s not an easy thing to do. And since you’ve put so much work into it, you should have a little bit of say of who you’re going to let boss you around. Who are you going to let participate in doing business with you. And not everybody needs to be super great and pleasant and it’s always a balance of how much money do they give me and how big is the headache, and that’s a sliding scale. But if you have a particular customer, whether it’s one or two or three, and you notice that they slow you down from growth, their jobs are not profitable, they stress you out, when the phone rings you make a noise before you pick it up. If all of these things are happening, then this customer is actually making it worse for all of your other customers.

Mark Stephenson:
That’s a good point. That’s a good point. And I think you’ve got to really own the idea that you don’t have to say yes. You don’t have to say yes to your current customers. You don’t have to say yes to new customers. You put yourself in the situation where you’re getting business that you want. Right now I’m at the point where in the marketing practice I’m starting to say no to potential customers. Just right up front, I’ll have a little conversation with you, I’ll try to help, but I really can’t take any more clients until the end of the year. I’m just too busy. So it’s a no. And some of the people that I’m just like, really, you don’t want to spend enough money, or I’m really not interested in that business, or you’ve just fired your third marketing person, it’s probably not the marketing, it’s probably you. You can make those decisions when you talk to people and just say, look, I don’t think I’m going to be able to help, I’m too busy at the moment. Feel free to try again at another time.

Marc Vila:
And so then we can even expand this from fire customers or refuse new customers.

Mark Stephenson:
Yes.

Marc Vila:
So they do fall into the same territory. One is you already know that they’re tough to deal with or you don’t mesh for whatever reason that is. And also another thing is they could be the nicest, coolest person, but it just so happens that what they need is not what you deliver very well. Whether it’s a type of apparel or a specific service, maybe… I had a friend who had a T-shirt shop and he had a customer that was just a salesperson hustler and he would go find people that wanted shirts in his neighborhood. So he would just talk to business owners. Then he would find somebody who wanted T-shirts and he would call him up and he’d be like, Hey, I need 20 T-shirts tomorrow, can you make it happen? How much? The job pays this. Okay great. And he said at first it was good because the money was good. He’s like, This guy’s paying me 20 bucks a T-shirt, I didn’t have to do any of the sales and et cetera, et cetera.

The problem was, was every time this guy called, he needed the shirts within sometimes hours. Can you make these tonight man? And the money was good. So the guy knew, he said he was a cool guy. He’s like, listen, this guy pays a lot for shirts. He knows how expensive it is to do super rush orders. That’s probably why he charges his customers whatever he was charging them that he could afford to pay 20, 30 bucks a shirt wholesale, because he’s making profit on that. And eventually he just said, Hey, I can’t do this. It’s not in his flow of business. He was doing e-commerce stuff. So he had very planned out orders and he was dealing with shipping and all of that stuff and he couldn’t drop everything and do an order because he was in the middle of making things from people he promised he was going to ship out today that ordered between five o’clock and 10 o’clock the next day. Stuff like that.

Mark Stephenson:
That’s a great example. And I think as your business grows, you do have to constantly reevaluate unfortunately some of those early customers, because there may have been compromises that you made, or when you’ve got unlimited availability because you’ve only got five customers, or 10 customers. So you’ve got plenty of time to do whatever they want you to do for money. So you’ve got the time and the equipment, you can do it. When you get to 50 it may be that the way those first few customers, you can’t support that kind of relationship anymore, you may get to that point. So if you look at your existing customers as you grow, constantly evaluate, reevaluate whether this is the most profitable use of my time and this is the best application for the business that you’re building.

Marc Vila:
And that actually goes into a bunch of stuff, which is almost a whole podcast in and of itself of sometimes you have to raise prices for these customers or change policy on older customers. And it happens to us every single day, everywhere we go. Return policies change, your doctor’s offices policies change, things change all the time. And sometimes you no longer do business with those places, whether it’s because they’ve made it where they don’t do what you do anymore, they’ve essentially fired you. And it gets even interestingly complicated. But when you’re talking about just retail stores do it to you all the time. Lowe’s used to carry a particular product all the time.

Mark Stephenson:
Oh yeah.

Marc Vila:
And you’re a contractor and used to go there all the time and buy this product. Well, Lowe’s decided not to carry it. Why? Maybe they broke on the shelf too much, or wasn’t profitable enough, or the vendor was hard to deal with. Whatever it was, they decide we’re not going to carry it. And we know that there’s a bunch of contractors who might not shop here anymore because that’s what they use and they’ve essentially had to fire you in a way. Not your fault they would love the business but it just doesn’t make sense anymore.

Mark Stephenson:
Great example, I like that a lot.

Marc Vila:
Yeah. So you have to think of your business holistically, look at groups of customers you have and it also could work for products as well. But look at all that and decide what shouldn’t be there anymore. Every once in a while. And you’ll know it when you feel it. And I know that, that’s really complicated when it gets to be… What do you do Mark if you have a customer, I’m going to put you on the spot. You have a customer that’s 40% of your income and you really don’t like them for many reasons, but they’re almost keeping your business afloat.

Mark Stephenson:
Yeah.

Marc Vila:
What would you do? What would you do?

Mark Stephenson:
It would be hard for me to get into that position because I really will only do business with people that I like. There is-.

Marc Vila:
All right. Well, I’m going to change it up on you then.

Mark Stephenson:
Okay.

Marc Vila:
I’m going to change it up because that is a great easy answer. But I want to make it harder for you.

Mark Stephenson:
Yes it is. Okay hit me with something harder.

Marc Vila:
So here’s the twist on it, is that you have a client who was your favorite client. Good money, great, every A plus across the board. And then they sold their business. They called you up one day and said, Hey, by the way, this person’s taking over starting next week. And great, well a week goes by all of a sudden this new person’s a nightmare but they’re 50% of your income. How do you handle something like that? Because I know that’s a challenge that I’ve read online and that’s why I’m asking is because I’ve read this online on Facebook groups, I’ve talked to somebody in person about this where they said, Gosh, I would love to get rid of this customer, but it’s so much money.

Mark Stephenson:
Yeah. So I would do two things, and I can appreciate that situation. What I would do is I would set a transition period goal, and I would aggressively look for replacement business. I would spend all my time looking for replacement business, because if I’ve got one customer that’s 50% of the business, that means I’m really not… I’m probably spending too much time executing that job than I am prospecting for new business. And I would just have to either work harder or free up extra time some way from that account or another to look for a replacement. Giving myself a deadline at the end of that period, I’m just not going to do it anymore. So 90 days try to get more clients to fill in as much of that, do whatever you can to do that and then just let them go because it’s not worth it.

Marc Vila:
Yeah. And I actually, when I spoke to someone in person about that, that’s the answer I gave. So that actually builds some confidence and having giving someone that advice before. But I had said, I said what you should honestly do is, first I said shore up the whole house, meaning that make sure all your stuff is efficient, clean, ready to go so you can make time, because what you’re going to need to do next is you’re going to need to find 10% of your time. Let’s just pretend you’re doing 50 hours a week, five hours a week to find a, or hopefully multiple clients to replace that one. And that’s what I would say to do, because it’s the same exact thing as if you work a job, which everyone in their life has that they really hated, what do you do? You start looking for another job and then when you find it, you get to leave the other job. You’re doing the same thing for clients.

Mark Stephenson:
And the other thing I will say if you have the financial luxury to do this or the wherewithal to plan more carefully, organize your personal life so that 50% customer doesn’t drive you bankrupt.

Marc Vila:
There you go.

Mark Stephenson:
Organize your finances so you can lose two customers or three customers or 25% of your business. And you may not get rich that year, but you’re going to be okay until you find somebody else. So the business number looks like crap, but your life is okay.

Marc Vila:
Okay, that’s good too. I think that’s great. And those are all realistic things and it is a real challenge in business. But the reason why you’re going to want to do this is because of what I said starting off. The goal is to have a successful business that well, that hits your goals and is satisfying to own and run. And it’s going to help all of, when you’re in a good mood and you’re happy to run your business and you’re satisfied, it helps all of your other clients because they’re going to hear it in your voice. I’m setting the next one up pretty good. All right, Mark.

Mark Stephenson:
Yeah, I like that.

Marc Vila:
They’re going to hear it in your voice, they’re going to like to talk to you, they’re going to want to participate in doing business with you. So, that leads us to the next one.

Mark Stephenson:
Okay, go ahead. You’re going to have to read your first line then.

Marc Vila:
It’s just be friendly.

Mark Stephenson:
Yeah.

Marc Vila:
Be nice to talk to. You catch more flies with honey is what they say.

Mark Stephenson:
Okay. Okay. So stop.

Marc Vila:
Do they say that?

Mark Stephenson:
So why are you catching flies? Do you have a spider? What is the whole point behind wasting honey to go out and try to catch flies?

Marc Vila:
I’m in the larva business.

Mark Stephenson:
You’re in the larva business.

Marc Vila:
Yeah.

Mark Stephenson:
You’re a fly fisherman.

Marc Vila:
Yeah. Well, no, not exactly, but-.

Mark Stephenson:
You’re using the honey to catch the flies. Is that not what that means?

Marc Vila:
I think it means, I’m sure somebody could look this up, but I would imagine that if that they would land on the honey and maybe get stuck or you could put poison in it.

Mark Stephenson:
Okay. Poison honey’s not something I ever thought of-.

Marc Vila:
Nobody wants flies unless you’re in the larva business.

Mark Stephenson:
Yes. The larva business. I’m going to google that, larva business per sale. So I agree. So the more that you, honestly, it really is the way it works. When I’m talking to a customer and I actually realize I can help them, like an attorney was using Google search ads and he said he was wasting money, he was just going to cancel it. So I took a quick look and he hired me to redo some stuff and within two weeks his cost per a customer was down by 50%. So, that’s a huge boost. And being able to take that enthusiasm to the next customer you successfully are, you’ve got 20 customers that you keep happy, it makes you feel more positive about your business. The next time you pick up the phone to talk to somebody, you know that as you grow, you’re going to bring that same kind of performance. And it makes it easy to be friendly, easy to naturally get more business when you talk to people about it.

Marc Vila:
And that ties it together with getting rid of bad customers, you have good customers that you’re happy to work with. Generally you’re satisfied with your business and you’re going to do well. And also just friendliness in general. Even if you have some bad customers, resetting yourself, being friendly, answering the phone in a friendly way, telling people you’re happy to help them saying, sure, no problem, don’t worry about that. I appreciate your business. Thank you for giving me the opportunity to help you. Just being a friendly and good person is generally speaking, going to have people want to do business with you. And I do find that people who have busy businesses are usually the jerkiest, but they don’t really-.

Mark Stephenson:
Really?

Marc Vila:
Yeah, it’s because they don’t really want new customers though. They’re too bitchy.

Mark Stephenson:
Got you.

Marc Vila:
Yeah.

Mark Stephenson:
I was thinking about when you fire that customer that is no longer, hits your business or whatever the reason is, I think it would be a very friendly idea to make a few suggestions on other companies that might fulfill their needs.

Marc Vila:
Yeah. Yeah. Helpful, sure.

Mark Stephenson:
So you really don’t like someone, but you still want to be friendly and kick them loose, then suggest that they buy from Amazon merch.

Marc Vila:
Yeah. Yeah. There’s plenty of things you could suggest. And there’s a whole episode about how to fire customers and I’ve read a lot of things about how to fire customers and make money from it, and how to fire customers, but get referrals from them. And there’s all these interesting things you can do. But I think the ultimate thing is here is that when people like you and they recognize that you’re sincere and that you’re really trying to do good for them. So when all that happens, then people are going to adhere to the reminders you gave for them. They’re going to respect your time and show up to your calendar invites. They’re going to want follow your procedures if you say, Hey, get me the artwork within 48 hours, they’re going to do it because they don’t want to do bad by you because you treat them right, you’re good to them.

And that’s, I think one of the great things. And one of the more important things about being friendly is you catch more flies with honey, whatever that actually is supposed to mean, I don’t know. But when you want people to do things for you that you prefer to do things for you, for people that you like than to do favors or things for people that you don’t really like. And I’ll tell you, a lot of, plenty of businesses we’ve all done with, you’re almost bothered to give them money because the person that you work with is just not friendly. It doesn’t seem like they care about you or your business. And that’s still important. Customer service is still important. And I had a conversation with friends of mine, not exactly related to this, but in a way, and they were talking about everybody wants a tip now. You can’t buy anywhere without them flipping an iPad around and wanting you to answer questions and to tip them for doing nothing basically.

But that came up in a group chat and then we were all talking about that and then it morphed into tipping the people you should tip. And everybody pretty much agreed that they’re like, If I have a server or whatever it is that really is just seems like they’re working hard and they’re treating me right and they’re doing good things, I’m happy to over tip them.

Mark Stephenson:
Yes

Marc Vila:
And they were all saying that they liked doing that. And I said that we’ve got ice cream for the family and there’s a young kid behind the counter. As soon as we walked in, super friendly, really nice to the kids, just treated them like kids, treated us like adults. He went and then he made everything with care. You could tell he wasn’t just sloppily putting it together. And it came, we checked out, it’s like $18 and I gave the kid five bucks.

Mark Stephenson:
Yeah.

Marc Vila:
I normally would not do that on ice cream, but I was just in a situation where I said, Gosh, it made an experience that I was expecting to be annoying, bringing kids and a bunch of adults into an ice cream place and I was going to pay for it. And it just turned into a whole pleasant thing. And I said, You know what? This kid deserves to be rewarded. I noticed we’ve been here and nobody else has been here this whole time. So he’s not tipping out a bunch of money tonight. And you do it. So I think that all in all, that just comes to a really long way to make a point that if you’re friendly, you will get good and good customers, you’ll keep good customers and it’ll give you the ability to fire those bad ones.

Mark Stephenson:
I love it. All right, I think that’s it for me.

Marc Vila:
All right then. Well, in regards to this, what I want is, I think the homework thing to do is if you don’t have a CRM, you should start making the moves to get one, even if it’s a free one. Make sure you know how to use your reminder and your calendar apps, whether it’s in the CRM that you’re going to use or on your phone, and if you can tie those together, whatever email you have, Google Office 365, iCloud, they all have calendar and reminder type of apps. And then consider some of your policies and procedures. How can these tie in together? And then just last, just be a good person to do business with and try not to do business with bad people. And then overall, that’s going to really help you keep those great customers and grow your business, hit your goals.

Mark Stephenson:
I love it. This has been Mark Stephenson from ClientsFIRST Marketing.

Marc Vila:
And Marc Vila from ColDesi.

Mark Stephenson:
You guys have a fantastic, well organized CRM driven, friendly growing business.

Marc Vila:
Wonderful.

The post Episode 185 – How to Handle and Keep Your Customers appeared first on Custom Apparel Startups.