Lifelong or new?

What’s more important? Creating customer relationships that last longer than you could hope for, or building a larger customer base? There are strong arguments for both directions, and I don’t think that either of them are more important than the other. I think that the answer should be based on where your company is at the moment, not where you want to be. I think we should be more focused on building stronger relationships right now, not getting new clients. Case in point: we recently pushed a new product out that increased our user base at the target company by a very large amount. I think we should focus more on increasing user base within our current clients before we try to gather new ones. The more people within a company that use our product, the more likely we are to keep our renew contracts, potentially for more money each year.

The more free products and services we can offer, the more likely we are to garner support within our current client base, and eventually, we can build our total number of company subscriptions to our “paid-only” services.

I know we offer “products” and “services” separately. I don’t think that we really have any real products. Everything we offer is a service. Access to reports that help users get work done faster. Events where we teach our ideas and foresights. Articles that reinforce our insights.

I say this because to me, a product is a physical object that a customer can take with them and use. Yes, the user can print our a copy of a report or article, but that is a capability of the services we provide. We are moving rapidly to the digital world, but I don’t think we have a clear plan on how we should do this. I think one of the first things we can do to help clarify it to both ourselves and our customers is to drop the artificial separation of products and services we offer, and really show them as they are.