Well I'm sure we'd all like to do both, but as with most things in business we are limited by time, resources, and most importantly MONEY.
Many business owners think the only way to grow is to increase sales revenue by winning new contracts, that they're existing clients are somehow "saturated". "They'll contact me if they need something".
Ask yourself this - what is the cost of:
(a) Acquiring a NEW client, versus
(b) Increasing the spend of EXISTING clients?
Well, without knowing anything about the specifics of your business, I can tell you (a) is ALWAYS much, much higher.
Why? - Because of all the EXTRA marketing spend, staff, expertise, experience, mileage/travel costs etc. that go into acquiring that NEW lead.
A good NEW client could take months to acquire, involving a highly paid sales individual (or director), mileage, marketing to engage with them etc.. Then you may get 1-2 orders to "test the water", which you have price as almost a "loss-leader" and make little-to-no profit (in the hope, the big stuff comes later)
Conversely, with existing customers you already have a relationship, they know you/trust you (hopefully), they place orders routinely, the order are easier won/less price sensitive, you meet less competitor resistance, you don't have to "sell" yourself.
This is one of the reasons why it is easier to implement a B2B web stragey, than a much more complex B2C strategy.
But what type of orders are they placing?...
What is the average order value?...
How profitable are those orders?...
Are they a narrow spectrum of job-types? (because they always order XYZ from you)
Your marketing spend with existing customers is negligible, so your % profit per-order is also much higher. These clients are also more likely NOT to be price sensitive - they trust the value you give, not just in price, but in quality, service etc.
How do we measure this?
Work out your average revenue per customer.
Analyse which types of work are the most profitable for you as a business - e.g. display graphics, signs etc.
Actively engage with customers to promote those profitable types of work and/or job-types they are not ordering now. e.g. use email marketing to drive them to your online ecommerce website. Email marketing is the cheapest form of marketing by far.
The result is:
You capture a higher % of your client's overall print spend - money they are spending elsewhere right now (perhaps they don't realise all the print services you offer)
You increase their average print-spend per customer, so grow revenue dramatically and quickly.
By targeting more profitable work, your % net margin increases (without more overheads or staff)
... ALL this by just communicating better with your existing clients - something you should be doing anyway!
Instead of perhaps 50% of the job profits just offsetting marketing spend (as with NEW clients)... Now 80-90% of the job profits go straight to your bottom-line NET profit.
Your Accura MIS, combined with CRM for email marketing, and Web-to-print for your client branded online portals makes all of this possible.
You simply CANNOT do all this without an end-to-end solution:
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