5 Powerful Client Retention Strategies for Experts

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For any business, especially for expertise led ones such as coaches and consultants, it is crucial to improve client retention.

You can define good client retention with these metrics:

Revenue growth
The breadth of services
More client relationships (at business clients)
References to other prospects

Client retention isn’t just about offering great advice once. It’s about delivering continuous value that helps your clients achieve their goals. It helps your contracts to not fade over time and result in a cancellation.

Some powerful ways to improve client retention is with good onboarding that sets expectations, SMART goal setting and periodic measurement of progress and value delivered.

In this blog, we’ll explore client retention strategies that experts can implement.

1. Onboard Better to Personalize the Experience

Before you dive into delivering all the good stuff, try to establish a proper baseline of performance before you start. Also define how exactly your services are going to help them.

Avoiding fuzziness helps you avoid disillusionment over time.

Examples:

Coaches: A life coach could use a self-assessment that covers different areas of a client’s life—work, relationships, health—so they can provide more targeted advice in each area so clients know exactly where they can expect to be in 3 months.
Business Consultants: A business consultant might design an assessment to evaluate areas like financial health, leadership, and marketing effectiveness to create a quantifiable action plan.
Tech Consultants: A technology consultant might design an assessment to measure the data or digital maturity, or define clear metrics such as how to measure quality of work done, or what improvements they will make over time.

By making business assessments part of your onboarding, you create transparent joint expectations. As a result, it’s easier to keep them engaged and motivated.

2. Set & Track SMART Goals for Client Retention

Goal setting is a proven method for keeping clients focused and motivated. It allows you and your clients to work together on setting clear, actionable milestones.

By using the SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, Time-bound) goal-setting framework, you can ensure that the goals you set are attainable. And you can easily align the goals with your client’s broader vision.

Examples:

Coaches: A career coach might help their clients set SMART goals about the size of network which will be measurable over time.
Consultants: A financial consultant could help a client set specific revenue goals or investment milestones, offering guidance on how to achieve them.
Course Creators: An educator could use SMART goals to help students set academic or project deadlines, ensuring they stay on track to complete the course.

SMART goal-setting doesn’t just keep clients motivated; it provides you with a framework to continuously offer value as they work towards their objectives.

3. Use Periodic Check-ins to Track and Show Progress

Experts often struggle with quantifying the value they have delivered. Often quantification is not easy to do too.

This is also a major reason why experts charge less than what they are worth, and why contract renewals become risky.

So, once you’ve set goals and provided a plan of action at the beginning, regular measurement and check-ins are crucial for maintaining momentum.

It allows you to compare your clients’ current progress and quantify your value. That way they can see how far they’ve come and what they still need to work on. It also clearly shows what can be done better.

By showing side-by-side comparisons of past and present assessments, clients can visually track their improvement. This builds trust and keeps them engaged in the process.

Examples:

Coaches: A wellness coach could use periodic check-ins to compare results over time, helping clients stay motivated by seeing real progress.
Consultants: A consultant working with a small business could use check-ins to measure updated data on assessments such as revenue, customer acquisition, and cost reduction. Then they could adjust strategies.
Course Creators: An expert could ask the audience to take the assessment at different stages of a course to see how the learning is translating into benefits.

Regular check-ins keep clients engaged. It reminds them of the value you bring while helping them stay on track to achieve their goals.

4. Periodically Share Market Insights and Benchmarks with Clients

The final strategy is to regularly share market insights and benchmarks.

These not only show that you are keeping up to date with the market, but also helps clients stay informed about industry trends.

This builds credibility and positions you as a valuable partner who goes beyond delivering services to providing strategic intelligence. Share relevant trends or notable new items.

Examples:

Coaches: A leadership coach could share insights on emerging trends on leadership or soft skills in similar roles or industries.
Consultants: A marketing consultant could provide quarterly updates on trends like shifting customer behaviors, digital platform performance benchmarks, or industry innovations.
Course Creators: An instructor offering business courses could highlight emerging opportunities relevant to the course content.

By delivering market intelligence and benchmarks, you keep clients engaged but promote your own expert brand.

Next Steps: Improve Client Retention with Evalinator

Client retention & growth is critical for any expertise based business such as coaches, consultants, professional services, and course creators.

You can transform your client retention strategy by using Evalinator’s interactive assessments for onboarding, SMART goal-setting, and periodic check-ins.

Start risk-free with our 2-week free trial and receive personalized support to get started.