Selling more stuff to existing customers

So how does senior management increase revenue?  There are only two ways to do this: sell more stuff to new customers, or sell more stuff to existing customers.  Selling more stuff to new customers is the harder of the two paths, by far. 

Let’s start with selling more stuff to existing customers.  Good management will have a significant focus on its existing customer base.  An existing customer is worth five times the revenue of a new customer.  That’s the reason there are so many loyalty programs in business today – you have to keep the customers you have today – and sell more to them – by making them unconditional happy partner/customers! 

What does this mean for marketers?  These are the “easy putts” on the golf course of business.  You’ve already got a relationship with an identifiable revenue stream.  Your focus will be on retention and loyalty – you’re not concerned (for the most part) with mass media channels – in fact, you’re more concerned with targeted communications directly with this base.  So think like a C-Suite person for a moment and develop a question they would like to have marketing answer.  Perhaps there are questions in their mind like, how much revenue is attributed to this portion of our current business?  What is the retention rate?  What are we spending to communicate with this critical group?  How are we engaging them to generate word of mouth sales?  They most certainly will not be thinking about GRPs, page views, etc.!