![businessman picking the low hanging fruit.](http://images.law.com/contrib/content/uploads/sites/292/2024/08/fruit_767.jpg)
Client Retention: Grabbing the Low-Hanging Fruit
This article explores the importance of client retention, strategies to nurture client relationships, and how to leverage those relationships for business development.
August 26, 2024 at 10:21 AM
7 minute read
What You Need to Know
- Your existing clients are the low-hanging fruit of business development. They are right in front of you, ripe and ready. But even low-hanging fruit needs to be picked.
- Building strong relationships with your clients not only creates opportunities to grow the relationships, get more work, and generate more referrals, but it also serves as an insurance policy if and when times get tough or you make a mistake.
- By implementing a proactive system, you can build deeper relationships, increase client satisfaction, and ensure a steady stream of repeat business and referrals.
Imagine yourself craving a delicious orange. The fastest, easiest way to get fresh, ripe oranges isn't by planting new seeds and hoping they grow. It's by tending to the existing, fruit-bearing trees. Similarly, in legal practice, your existing clients are your most abundant source of potential revenue. This article explores the importance of client retention, strategies to nurture client relationships, and how to leverage those relationships for business development.
Why Client Retention Is Your Most Effective Business Growth Strategy
Various sources say that it can cost 10 to 30 times more time and effort to acquire new clients than to retain existing clients. On the other hand, spending that time instead on making sure that you keep your existing clients happy — tending your existing orange trees — can reap substantial benefits and generate significantly more revenue. In fact, research done by Frederick Reichheld of Bain & Company (the inventor of the net promoter score) demonstrated that increasing client retention rates by just 5% can yield profit increases of 25% to 95%.
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