It costs anywhere from five to eight times more to gain a new lessee as opposed to retaining your existing lessees. Sixty-eight percent of customers will fail to enter into another lease agreement if they feel unappreciated. This is the number one reason leasing companies lose customers. Based upon these two statistics, it’s obvious your business needs to place as strong an emphasis on keeping existing lessees as it does on gaining new ones.

Let’s use love as an analogy for obtaining repeat business. Why? Because everybody wants to be loved. If you fall in love with leasing, you become inspired and enthusiastic and your customers can feel your passion. Fall in love with your customers (to be clear, think of it as loving kindness, not romantic love) and you end up taking the best course of action for them and their business. It becomes a win-win situation.

Falling in love proceeds in five sequential stages: attraction, bonding, trust, respect and attachment. The problem with most sales strategies and marketing plans is that they try to skip some of the early stages, especially the crucial early stages bonding and trust. Let’s analyze each of the stages.

Attraction
Did you attract the lessee? Was the lessee brought to you though a vendor? Does the lessee even know who you are? It’s difficult to get repeat business if the customer doesn’t know that you are their leasing company.

Even though you have a booked transaction with this customer, you still have to go through the attraction phase.

The first way to do this is to be aware of the first interaction your company has with the lessee. Is the first time you talk to a new customer during verbal verification? Are you greeting them kindly and with happy employees? Or is your first real communication an invoice they receive in the mail with three different fees that they never expected?

When there are no unpleasant surprises and your company’s representatives are warm and display a pleasant demeanor, your customers will want to return for future dealings. It is important to many customers that leasing company employees and vendors take the time to provide personal service and knowledgeable help, especially in an age of e-mail and telephone call processing. Make sure you have enough staff to meet customers’ needs and train your employees to remain pleasant and courteous at all times, even when a customer becomes irate or short-tempered. Also, make sure your employees feel just as special and valued as your customers. If your employees don’t feel valued, they sure aren’t going to make the customers feel special.

Bonding
Statistics show that most people fall in love with someone that they have known for a while. It will be easier to fall in love with your lessee once they have demonstrated that they make their monthly payments on time. Once the lessee feels comfortable with you, the bonding process will go both ways. The best way to bond is to communicate, communicate, communicate. If you want to become the resource for your lessees, you have to be “top of mind” for them when leasing is mentioned. A great financial product or service and excellent customer service help, but reminders from your marketing department are crucial. This doesn’t mean bombarding them with junk mail and spam, it means sending valuable information on a timely basis. For example: remind them of §179, provide tips or an informative article … something that they’ll look at and make a mental note of at least.

Hopefully you are collecting your lessee’s e-mail addresses. According to the Direct Mail Association, more customers would rather be contacted by e-mail than by the telephone. Put your lessees on a formal e-mail marketing schedule and it will speed up your bonding experience. Also, don’t be afraid to mention past e-mails that you’ve sent out.

In many cases, we’re racking our brains to come up with new valuable information when the customer never opened the last e-mail that was sent. Why not add an unobtrusive “Did you miss?” notation to the bottom of your e-newsletter? A brief paragraph with links to past topics could also be used. You will get a small percentage of your customers going to past issues. Even if some lessees had read the previous message, most of them won’t mind a recap. And those who didn’t see the e-mail the first time around have a second shot at something that could be of real value to them. Don’t be afraid of a rehash. After all, not everybody reads every e-mail every day.

When you’re bonding, you want to know as much as possible about your partner. Google alerts can help you do that. Google alerts are e-mail updates of the latest relevant Internet results based on your choice of query or topic. It is like having your own personal research service. Go to www.google.com/alerts. You can create an alert by topic, company name or an individual’s name. Now you can easily keep up with what is happening in your customers’ businesses.

Trust
Three characteristics — kindness, intelligence and trust — are extremely important in the process of falling in love. (The interesting fact is that attractiveness is not part of this equation.) These three attributes are things that people learn about someone from knowing them over time. Intelligence is important in all aspects of life, especially in love and leasing. However, kindness and trust are the strongest indicators for a successful long-term relationship.

One way to develop trust is to ask for and act on customer feedback. This is something that gets overlooked, or only gets half done. It’s hard to build repeat business if you don’t know what your customers value. Ask your customers what they like, don’t like, and what your company could do better and then act on it. I don’t mean every piece of feedback is worth acting on, but if you hear the same thing over and over, or if a comment rings true, do something about it.

An equally important step to take is to make it as easy as possible for customers to resolve any problems they have. Take responsibility for any issue that arises even if the customer is at fault. If you are not able to meet their request, emphasize what you can do for them. Never leave your customers with the impression you cannot help them, instead give them options as to what you can and will do to resolve their problem. Taking a small loss on a late fee can pay for itself in repeat business.

Like it or not, many lessees choose leasing because of its convenience. How convenient it is to do business with you? You need to think like a customer. Take a good look at your business and ask yourself, would I write a lease for my mother and use these practices?

Another way to score loyalty points is to continue talking to lessees even when you’re not trying to sell them something. This keeps you in touch with their wants and needs. And special offers shouldn’t just be used to attract new lessees — offer them to your loyal patrons as well.

Respect
Many brokers are so busy trying to land their next deal that they don’t value or respect their existing customers. A strategy here would be to Love The One You’re With, (my apologies to Steven Stills of Crosby, Stills & Nash).

Respecting your lessees will enable you to make your customers work for you. Repeat customers are walking billboards. If a customer comes back for a second lease, chances are pretty good that they liked what they experienced the first time around. And from there, chances are they will spread the word — publicity that comes free of charge to you.

“Recent estimates put each person’s circle of influence at between 50 and 300 people. Imagine the time it would take a sales rep to generate 300 potential prospects,” says Jay Lipe, author of The Marketing Toolkit for Growing Businesses. “Yet by connecting with a repeat customer, and finding ways for them to communicate with their circle of influence about your company, you’ve just expanded your sales force, without incurring additional overhead.”

Quarterly status reports that advise the lessee of how many payments are remaining show respect. You show that you value their business and you are willing to make the extra effort to keep them up to date. Informing your customers of co-terminus lease add-ons, and your trade-up policies may make the customer want to take action and boost their existing equipment.

The best possible scenario is to have a lessee that enjoys doing business with you so much that they enter into a master lease agreement. Remember, this is a great market to be asking your customers to take action. Banks have tightened up their credit policies and the lessee may be looking to you so he doesn’t have to dip into his existing lines.

Attachment
The attachment, or commitment, stage is love for the duration. You’ve passed fantasy love (being looked at as a commodity) and are entering into real love. This is where the lessee thinks of you first when it comes to financing equipment.

The philosophy of setting something free, to see if it will come back to you, works with true love, but it has no place in business. Your job is to retain your customers and provide such outstanding service that they can’t wait to do another deal.

Take these steps and you’ll find repeat business. You and your customer will have a magical advantageous relationship. You won’t have to worry about volume falling; instead when some new sweet-talking leasing rep comes around the lessee will just say, “stop,” because he really loves you. Look in your heart and let leasing love keep you together.

---

Linda P. Kester is a bestselling author and professional speaker with 20 years of experience in leasing sales and marketing management. She has helped hundreds of salespeople increase their volume. Her book, 366 Marketing Tips for Equipment Leasing, has produced results for leasing companies in the U.S., United Kingdom and Australia.