It is amazing how much money and effort is spent in generating new business and how little is spent on retaining it. According to a survey by NFIB, small business owners cited poor sales as their single greatest problem, well above inflation, taxes or the cost and availability of health insurance. Retaining your customers is often inexpensive or even free and can generate additional revenue in the long run from repeat sales. Furthermore, these relationships can be leveraged to instill confidence in potential customers. So what are some of the steps you can take to better retain your customer base?

1. Know who your customers are: A good CRM can go a long way in helping you manage your customer relationships. It also helps to know who your best customers are. If you a have few large clients, your best customers would be easy to identify. However, if you have thousands of customers, this may require some work.

Consider offering your best customers better discounts or promotions. The logic is that if you are able to retain this set of customers, they will bring in large volume to justify the discounts. Furthermore, it is critical to retain these customers because they bring in large volume of business.

2. Know how your customers behave: You are in a better position to connect with your customers if you put yourself in their shoes and use that as a point of reference when dealing with them. Your products, solution, strategy and promotions are more likely to work if they are reversed engineered based on your customer's actual needs.

3. Interact with your customers: The more time your customers spend talking to you, the less time they will have to consider doing business with your competitors. You can use business networking websites such as GlobalLinker.com or LinkedIn.com to better interact with your customers. GlobalLinker.com offers a free CRM and business tools to interact with your customers. SalesForce.com also offers an online CRM which is inexpensive.

It is usually a lot easier to get more business from your existing customers than it is from potential customers. By following the steps outlined above, you can retain your customers and increase stability in this unstable economy.