The Desert of Arizona
Clear 62 Degrees – 6:07 a.m.
CLV is a fancy acronym for a very powerful idea. Customer/Client Lifetime Value.
That means, how much VALUE a customer or client adds to your business over time.
When I started in marketing, I thought about this number from a “here is what I can get from this person over time” type of way. I also approached this number from a “how quickly can I get that” point of view.
It’s pretty crass to say that out loud about human beings. But know that most businesses are thinking about you like that because that’s how they’ve been taught to do it. They’ve even been taught it’s cool and “sophistimacated.” 🙂
These days, I’ve learned to view this number differently. I use that number as incentive NOT to screw things up for money.
That CLV number isn’t the bag of gold I’m chasing, it’s the price I pay if I screw up a relationship.
Much like the principle my wife and I use when raising kids, the same approach works with clients and customers: they come into your world just the way they should be. Your job is NOT to screw them up just because you can’t get past your own issues.
The world of the interwebz is still like the Wild West. But it’s growing up quickly. In the “old days,” maximum cash extraction, as certain individuals refer to it, was something you tried to do in a big way and often.
These days, people run away at the first sign of you trying to manipulate them. Who wouldn’t run away when a business owner can’t help but see you as little more than a wallet with a heartbeat?
So value is something that flows into your business from customers, clients, patients over time.
If you try to get it all at once, you will lose. If you are patient, take a long view, and always, always, ALWAYS do your best to take only a small portion, in return, for the value you deliver, then things develop more fully over time.
Much like the media platform approach to client attraction, you pay for results in TIME.
Are you patient? Are you willing to wait?
CLV isn’t something you “extract,” it’s something that develops like a flower growing from a seed.