Winning Business and Loyal Clients in Accounts Receivable Factoring
"How to Sell More to Your Existing Clients" Advice Desk
In this series of articles aimed at assisting you in winning business and loyal clients, Mark Mandula, Principal, Vice President, United Capital Funding, offers his guidance from the viewpoint of an experienced business finance and factoring professional based in the US.

Tampa Bay Office:
United Capital Funding Corporation
146 Second Street N.
Suite #200
 St. Petersburg, FL 33701
727-894-8232

Our firm, United Capital Funding Corp. provides working capital and professional Accounts Receivable factoring services to entrepreneurial firms on a national basis. I am often asked by our clients and or prospective clients how they can significantly increase their sales to current or potential clients. While this sounds like an easy question to answer, it is very difficult to provide a standard response to our invoice factoring  clients in the manufacturing, distribution, wholesale industries.

It seems that the correct response is for our financial services clients to implement a strategy that focuses on increasing the average sale to existing clients, as we do with own factoring clients; while at the same time constantly seeking ways to attract and retain new clients and customers. If this assumption is valid, then what marketing strategies can we use to accomplish both of these goals?

Fundamental Marketing Strategies
If we step back and reread for a minute our college Marketing textbooks, we will recall that there are really only 8 basic ways to market a business. Relative to financial services, we offer invoice factoring, and we apply many of these strategies to our Accounts Receivable clients. What then are the tools you can use in the expansion of your business? I will review 5 of the 8 fundamental marketing strategies that you can use to increase the revenue you generate from your existing clients, and assist in building new client revenue channels.

Acquire new clients. This is the first and most obvious strategy we apply in seeking accounts receivables management clients. In order to do this successfully, you need to target your product or services to a specific segment of prospects that need your services or products. This is accomplished by performing niche prospecting, identifying new segments with the goal to acquire new, high value clients.

Increase the existing loyalty and reduce the “churn” of your current clients. Easier said than done. The most successful factoring clients we serve have developed loyalty campaigns to help the average duration of the client relationship increase over time. At the same time, it's important to develop programs to show the unprofitable clients the exit door. This requires, of course, accurate revenue/cost data on an internal basis to determine which clients are in the profit or loss category. Finally, some clients use data to prioritize services to the most profitable clients in an attempt to keep the best clients happy.

Conclusion
The key to long term financial success for any business is the development and retention on clients that are truly happy and served well. In this article, I hope that a quick review of 5  fundamental marketing strategies will assist you in the growth and success of your entrepreneurial enterprise.