The biggest asset your business has is the people who already paid you. Most business owners never count it, so they never reach out to it either.

The asset behind you

When an owner thinks about customers, he looks forward: another ad, another lead, another cold call. The source looks the other way, backward. You already have a group of people who made it through the hardest part of the sale, because they already paid.

So the source isn't asking where the next customer comes from. It's asking how you keep the people you already won, and how you build personal contact with them that you start, instead of waiting for them to remember you.

That isn't a question of manners or polite service. It's a question of income. There's business here that was already built, and business that already exists can be lost.

The source tells of one large company that reorganized the way it worked. It discovered, to its shock, that it had never once contacted the customers who'd already done business with it. It only sold to new ones. By its own estimate, that cost it around 200,000 sales a year, and it put a new system in place right away.

In a business of a few people the number is smaller. The pain is the same.

Who belongs in the file

To talk about this asset you have to define it. The source calls it the customer file: the record of the people who bought from you, and what happened with them. And it makes a sharp claim about that file. A business's potential fortune, its potential income, is its customer files.

Not one source of income among several. The whole potential fortune. And the definition of who belongs is explicit: people who have bought something from the business.

Someone who showed interest is not in it. Someone who left their details is not in it. Someone who came in for a consultation and didn't close is not in it either. Only someone who bought.

That's the line between two audiences. One hasn't pulled out a credit card yet, and the other already has. Those are two very different kinds of relationship. Whoever mixes them up treats a paying customer like a cold lead, and throws away the advantage he holds with exactly that person.

Suppose a self-employed tax preparer tags everyone who ever called him in his contacts, including people who asked one question on the phone and disappeared. When he wants to reach out to his clients, the message goes to 260 people. Only 40 of them ever paid him. His list looks big, but the real file is a fraction of it, and none of those 40 gets treated like someone who already bought.

Why it doesn't happen on its own

It's tempting to think a happy customer will come back by himself. The source rejects this outright: getting your income is not a mysterious action, and “People don't just walk in out of the blue.”

A small business owner tends to believe the opposite. He knows the first sale took effort, but he's sure a second one will show up on its own as long as he did good work. It won't. Good service is necessary, but it isn't a mechanism. Without action on your side, a happy customer stays a happy customer who simply forgets you.

And that neglect has a price. In the source's words, someone who gives away customer files, lets the addresses go stale, or never works them is handing over a big piece of his income.

Gives away is the right phrase. This isn't income a competitor won from you fair and square. It already belonged to you, and you let it slip away by never reaching out.

Suppose an HVAC contractor changes his business phone number every few years because the carrier has a new deal. He doesn't tell his existing customers. When one of them has an air conditioner break down, that customer searches Google from scratch and finds someone else. The customer didn't leave because of bad service. He just couldn't find the way back.

What keeps going once you start

The reason this is worth your time is that what you put into an existing customer doesn't stop with him. The source lists two of the strongest promotion factors a business has: satisfied customers, and good relationships inside the team. The second is on the list because of how it affects word of mouth.

Keep a customer in your file, stay in touch, look after him well, and he does more than return. He starts telling other people about you. And he doesn't only remember the product. He also remembers the atmosphere in which he got it.

The opposite of the tax preparer and the HVAC contractor is a neighbourhood coffee shop where the owner remembers each regular's name and usual order. The customers tell their neighbours about it, and he never once asked them to.

What the booklet has on this

In The Second Sale this chapter ends with two short exercises: the count, and the last outreach. The chapters after it deal with the customer file itself, the customer's next step, and asking for a referral.

The customer who already bought from you already knows you're good. The only question is whether he hears from you.