Lesson: "Do you know where your Top Prospect is right now?"

I spend a lot of time with brands focusing on how to take Top Prospects, and turn them into Top Clients. Many think they need to reach outward to bring new clients in. As I will explain, sometimes those "Home Run Hitters" are already on your bench. You don't need to bring in a new player.

About 10 years ago, I managed the Fine Jewelry Salon at Tiffany Rodeo Drive. At the start of a new year, I sat down with a colleague to look at who our top clients were. We wanted to see where our new "Top Clients" were coming from and if there were any patterns for us to leverage.

Our first step was to run a report detailing the clients who had spent $100K or more in a single purchase during the previous year. We'd had a good year and found over a dozen clients on our list.

Our next step was to remove from the list anyone who were previously known Fine Jewelry clients, so anyone we already identified as "Loyals", or existing top clients, were removed. This was about 25% of our list, and we were happy to see about 75% as new names on our Top Spenders list.

As we researched these "new" top clients, we learned something that was informative, surprising, and of astonishing value to our overall business and to each of us individually. We quickly discovered that of these "new" clients", ALL BUT ONE OF THEM, were, in fact, not "new" at all. They had consistently shopped in our boutique before- but never in our Fine Jewelry Salon. Moreover, they had shopped very consistently (on average, 4 purchases per year for 5 years or more), and at relatively (for Tiffany) low price points ($1,000 average).

These "new" top clients were already been clients of ours!

So, what was the Lesson, and how did we use it to drive our business further?

The Lesson we learned was this:

Our future Top Spenders were already visiting us. They were TESTING us. They visited us with the financial capability to be a $100,000 sale. But we needed to build their trust through the quality of our merchandise and the exemplary levels of service. By purchasing less expensive items (usually business gifts or less significant personal gifts), they were able to reassure themselves that we were consistent in both service and product. Once that trust was built, the "big sale opportunity" came about.

From this we built a strategy that was rolled out to the whole store, reinforcing not only our belief that EVERY client deserves exemplary service, but quantifying for our team exactly how we (unknowingly to that point) had seen the results. We asked the Silver and Tabletop teams to help us find Prospects, and to partner with colleagues in Fine Jewelry, to more actively introduce their clients to our assortment. These insights excited and activated our entire boutique to really understand how everyone played a key role in laying the groundwork to make these substantial sales happen. As a result of these insights and our refocus, our success continued, and increased further as a result of these learnings.

In one exceptional case, a woman who had purchased only silver gifts and picture frames for her business clients in the past, decided to reward her own business success with a significant gift to herself- a diamond and sapphire bracelet for $140,000!

My point in sharing this Lesson is this- Don't spend so much time trying to get someone who has never shopped with you to become a top client, when you already have loyal, financially capable clients who just need to have enjoyable experience to be loyal to your brand and to "give you a shot" at a substantially higher price point.