Marketing for keeps

the long version

Current customers are overwhelmingly a company's greatest potential source of sales and profits. For many businesses, 80% of sales come from 20% of their existing clientele. Yet companies spend about five times more money on campaigns to attract new customers than in developing and executing strategies to retain current customers. Marketing for Keeps: Buying Your Business by Retaining Your Customers provides a blueprint and proven strategy for developing and mining a company's most valuable resource: its current customers. Based on original research at 35 North American customer retention champions, both large and small, including America West Airlines, Au Bon Pain, BellSouth Mobility, Burnaby Hospital, Fidelity Investments, Northwestern Mutual Life, USAA and Xerox; organized around a 12-step management planning model for customer retention; shows how to use customer research to uncover real customer needs provides tools to help identify your best customers Shows how to improve customer contact, tighten your grip on current customers through multiple relationships and recover lost customers; and shows how to empower employees and develop teamwork around a customer retention plan. Marketing for Keeps is a book for managers and executives in all companies: from entrepreneurial start-ups to the Fortune 500. In a back-to-basics age. it shows how to take action and make money on the most basic element of any business: your current customers.