While not everyone you come across is going to give you their business or become a returning customer, every good customer service professional knows that business is a lot more than just closing a one-time deal.

They understand the benefit of having a clear, concise, and detailed plan that every customer should ideally go through as they build their relationship with their brand. This is where a client life cycle comes in.

A client life cycle allows you to be better equipped in turning one-off customers into loyal promoters of the brand.

The client life cycle stages discussed in this blog post are universal and can be applied to almost any business type.

What is the Client Lifecycle?

As a business owner, you most likely have heard a fair bit about managing client relationships with your organization and how much it matters. After all, your customer is largely the reason your business is still running.

This makes it important to spend ample time and effort to make sure that you are equipped with the right knowledge to meet your customer's demands and turn them into a returning client.

All successful businesses have loyal customers sitting at their very core. But for your business to create this loyal base that turns into your brand advocates, you need a solid plan of action.

This powerful plan of action can be created by designing an efficient client life cycle process.

The client life cycle consists of various stages that a customer goes through before, during, and after they complete interaction with your business. It is a customer's journey from point A to point B and everything in between.

Stages of a Client Lifecycle

1. Leads – Good vs Bad

The first step in the client lifecycle includes examining leads and asking the right questions to determine how your future relationship with them would unfold.

A lead is a person who shows an interest in the service or product you have to offer. A lead source is a channel that brings that lead to your business. Knowing where each of your leads is coming from (your lead source) serves as "ground zero" of building your relationship with them.

Knowing your lead sources can lead to several benefits:

• It helps you identify the top-performing marketing channels. This way, your sales team can quickly close a good lead if they know it is coming from a high-performing source.

• It shortens your overall client lifecycle. According to HubSpot’s sales statistics, half of the leads businesses generate amount to nothing. By knowing your lead sources, your sales team can quickly analyze the quality of the lead. This way, they can quickly determine whether the lead is qualified and ready to buy or should it be abandoned. This saves your company a lot of time and hard work. 

• It helps determine your expected ROI. By managing your lead sources, your company can determine which channel is contributing how much to the business's bottom line. This would then help with adjusting your expectations and getting an idea of how many leads you should be receiving from one week to another.

2. Appointment Setting – Determining Qualified vs Unqualified Leads

The goal of setting an appointment with a client is to get your business at the forefront of as many customers as possible and create new partnerships with them to make sales.

This process includes calling the leads, qualifying them as prospective clients (aka “intake notes”), ensuring that they are the decision-makers, and then scheduling an appointment with them.

Before you set up an appointment, you should do your homework about the lead themselves as that would allow you to ask the right questions during the appointment.

Asking the right questions would not only lead to an effective sales call in the future but also help you determine whether the individual is qualified as a prospective buyer or not.

Do not be afraid to tell an individual that they are unqualified for your business. That is, you are not in a position to help them. Always follow that up with suggesting an alternative – someone who can help them solve their problem.

3. Sales Call

This step is where all the questions you have asked during the appointment setting process will come in handy.

Go through your intake notes thoroughly before going into the appointment and set a game plan ahead of time based on those notes.

Here are a few things to make sure of during an appointment:

• Ensure you are talking to the decision-maker. The first thing you need to make sure is that you are talking to the right person i.e., the decision-maker.

• Find their pain points. In this stage, dig for information about the client's needs and problem they need solved. It is better to have the client themselves say the problem that they are facing rather than you telling them that they have it. 

• Create urgency. Tell the client the impact not fixing the problem can, or will, have on their life, but that it’s a problem you can fix for them. Differentiate yourself from your competitors. Paint a scenario in a way that compels them to act soon and require your services now rather than later.

• Show them how you can solve their problem. This is the most important part of the appointment. Before you head into this stage, ensure you have asked all the right questions and have heard the client’s requirements thoroughly. You can then show them how your business can provide a solution to their problem.

• Attempt to close the deal. Once you are done with all these steps, it is now time to attempt to close the deal and turn the lead into a customer. During this, you should walk your prospect through each option you have to offer. Ease them into closing the deal instead of making them feel like you are overselling or forcing the product on them. Ask them what makes sense to them and then guide them in the right direction that leads to closing the deal.

4. Hires

Always have a goal to shoot for. Track how many sales calls turned into real clients for the business and adjust your future strategy according to that.

Make sure to follow up on qualified leads that ended up not hiring your business. Follow up with them and ask them what went wrong and if you can help in any other way.

5. Referrals – Requesting Reviews and Referrals

Your ultimate goal at the end of a client lifecycle is to turn customers into advocates. An advocate is someone who becomes a loyal customer of yours and increases your brand visibility by sharing it with others.

Advocates are one of the most effective marketing tools your business will build. To turn clients into advocates, you need to provide them with exceptional service by giving them superior products, personalized customer service, and better price offers.

Benefits of Managing the Perfect Client Life Cycle

Managing the perfect client life cycle leads to many long-term growth and sustainability benefits for businesses and organizations. Properly identifying the stages of your client lifecycle can lead to the following benefits-

You Are Able to Provide a Personalized Experience to Each Customer

With a detailed client life cycle process, you can provide each customer with a personalized experience. You are better able to identify what an individual needs in order to convert from a prospect to a client and fulfill those needs accordingly.

Your Customers Feel Heard and Looked After

By enabling you to provide a personalized experience with each customer, a client life cycle makes you better able to tailor your marketing and sales strategies to suit that of the individual. In return, the client feels valued and appreciated by your business because they are not getting the same, dull automated customer support as they do everywhere else.

According to the Harvard Business Review, an average American business loses 50 percent of their business due to subpar customer service caused by having no client life cycle in effect to retain clients.

Another study shows that 73 percent of the customers leave a business due to dissatisfaction with customer support. The study also found that the company thinks only 21 percent leave because of bad customer service and that the rest leave due to cost-related reasons.

As astonishing as these statistics are, what makes them even more unbelievable is how customer support is so undervalued by most companies despite it being so crucial for their growth. 

You Greatly Increase Chances of Customer Loyalty

Of course, not every person who buys from you is going to turn into a loyal customer despite your best efforts. Sometimes, people only need a service once and that is okay.

However, having a good client life cycle in place helps increase the chances of customer retention pretty significantly.

Instead of forgetting about your customers after they make a transaction, stay engaged and connected with them.

A client lifecycle also allows you to see where your customers are having a problem during the entire process and what you can do to guide them through it.

Your Organization Saves Time and Money

It comes as no surprise that effective client life cycle management saves your organization time and money.

One of the biggest reasons is because it is more cost and time-effective to focus on retaining the existing customers rather than trying to land new leads and then converting them into customers.

Existing customers are likely to stay on board as they have already expressed an interest in your business. They are familiar with your brand which means you don’t have to waste time pitching an offer to them over and over again.

Therefore, it is in every company's best interest to provide great customer service, stay on top of their customer journey through the funnel, and provide quality service.

You Are Able to Monitor the Profitability of Your Marketing and Sales Strategies

Managing your client life cycle effectively allows you to monitor what your process is doing in terms of profitability and ROI (return on investment). This allows you to better adapt the steps you are going to take in the future to make maximum profits for your business.

The Bottom Line

By managing your business’s client life cycle, you provide your customers with exceptional service and support. They are more likely to choose you over any other business for their future needs.

Take a more customer-centric approach for your business and start mapping out a typical client’s journey with your company. What action do you want the customer to take with your brand? How can you help them get to the next step? How can you retain their interest in your business?

This is why a thorough client life cycle management strategy is so important. It helps you to take the right actions at the right times, leading to sustainable and long-term growth for your company.