How Eric Morecambe Can Help You Turn Your Database into a Fanbase?

Do you remember Eric Morecambe? I saw him doing a so-called magic trick in the seventies (before I was even born)

Click on the image below to see a short video of Eric’s trick (brilliant, innit?)

He threw, (what some people called an imaginary) ball into the air and made the noise of the ball dropping into a brown paper bag – I never considered it to be imaginary – I knew it was actually an invisible ball.
I thought, “That’s just brilliant. That’s just great, I’ve gotta learn how to do that.” So I practiced and practiced it and mastered it for family Christmas parties round at my Gran & Granda’s house’, or as we all used to call them, Wee Sammy & Wee Sadie.
After a while I thought “What would happen if I put a hole in the bottom of the bag”? So I tore a hole in the bottom of the bag and surprise, surprise … It didn’t work. No worries, it was still a great trick and when I do it today, I still get a laugh.

I forgot all about it until a few years ago; I was in seeing a client of mine, chatting about how his sales were going. (I had been working with him for a while, helping him get new customers in and I had run some workshops for his inbound and outbound sales teams.

He said “Stuart, we’re now doing great at getting new customers in, but I know that when it gets to the end of their contract they’ll leave and go elsewhere.”

It was an insurance company and they were losing 23% of their new business, when the Insurance Policy was due to be renewed.

(NB On average, according to a report by The Chartered Institute of Loss Adjusters, 25% of people leave their Insurance Provider to go elsewhere.

ICLA also reckon that a massive 35% people will consider going elsewhere.They might not go but they’ll consider it.

My client said “Stuart we can get our customers in but no sooner are do we get them in than they drop out. We lose them. That’s the main reason we’ve got you in, we need to keep topping up the sales funnel because so much business drops out of the bottom”.

So I said “it would appear that you’re doing well with your Acquisition Strategies but I think we need to start working on some Retention strategies.”
He had to look at his customers as a Fanbase rather than just a Database – how could we turn what were short term customers into long term clients – think about it more as a Relationship rather than a Transaction.

As we looked at his Sales Funnel, it struck me – this is just like Eric Morecambe’s Brown Paper Bag trick from all those years ago. He could get the balls into the bag but unless there was something to keep them, they’d just drop straight out of the bottom. We needed something like a mesh, a spider’s web or a network of strategies to retain them.
What worked for him, can work for most businesses. What worked for him with however many thousands of customers he had, works for business of any size – from OMOs (One Man Operators) through SMEs (Small to Medium Enterprises) all the way to large corporates

I’d like to share these techniques with you in my next few Blog Posts, because I know they should work for you. They worked for my client, for me as an Independent Speaker, Trainer and Coach and they work for a number of people I do work with.

So there are a number of things we worked with. Here are 8 of them:

Click on the link to check out a video of me delivering my

How Eric Morecambe Can Help You Turn Your Database into a Fanbase?”  

Keynote Speech