Page 32 - Future Demands Jan 2021

But, even if it wasn’t, and it was simply driven by the economic imperative to stay in business, it is a great lesson, and one which many business owners will hope is remembered long into 2021 and beyond.
There is also a second rule of marketing that good advisers know that reminds us that not all customers are created equally, and some are much more valuable than others.
you need data. Data on the market and data on your customers. What customer groups can you approach to service more of their financial services needs? What customer groups will deliver best on your investment of time and effort? And when you really know your customer, where can you go and find more like them?
The mortgage market has many good sources of data, from the granular detail about customers from your own
FUTURE DEMANDS
“THE CUSTOMER YOU ALREADY HAVE IS MUCH MORE LIKELY TO BUY FROM YOU THAN THE CUSTOMER YOU HAVE TO GO OUT AND FIND”
These two rules underpin what the ‘Father of Management Consulting’ Peter Drucker meant, when he said back in the 1980s, “The purpose of a business is to create a customer”.
What he’s saying is that a sale is a sale, but a customer could be for life, and I’d like to see advisers finishing their year proud about the number of customers they gained rather than just the sales they made.
And these rules apply to lenders, just as much as to adviser firms.
To put both these rules into practice,
CRM systems through to the mass aggregated data from sourcing systems, and the future pathway for our collective industry is clear. We just need to embrace it.
Ultimately, the lesson of 2020 is that the remarkable, the unthinkable, can happen – markets can close. But, even in the face of the most significant challenges good firms and excellent advisers can survive and prosper by doing the basics well – pursuing customers, rather than just sales.
32