I've worked for a number of small, private sector companies in the US and worked with others from the UK, all trying to grow their international business. I've worked for them in good times and in pretty bad times. But they all had one thing in common - when they got customers, they paid a lot of attention to looking after them.
You can see the same principle at work among the information marketers - like us, people who rely on making their way in the world by providing useful information that others can use to improve their own situation. And the one thing that the best of them do - and consistently - is to keep in contact with their current customers.
Now they, like IPAs and private businesses, obviously have to continue their efforts to find new business. But, when the going gets tough, the tough get going - first of all to stay in touch with the people who are helping to keep them going: their customers.
As far back as the 1980's, Frederick Reichheld, from the Bain Consulting company, undertook research on the impact of loyalty in business and found that those companies that took a deliberate decision to look after their clients over the long term (and to look after their own employees too, interestingly enough) enjoyed overhead costs 15% below their competitors' and growth rates that were 22% higher.
Perhaps the first step economic development agencies and governments need to take is a much greater effort to develop deeper relationships with existing investors. Next would be advocating to their political masters that 'aftercare' might often happen without the IPA's direct involvement, but that the question that really needs to be asked is: 'How much more could we get if we put more effort into it' and: 'How much reinvestment are we losing that we don't even know about?'. The final step, that I'll talk about next time, would be to make an effort to join the dots in a much more coherent way between the respective effort made to win new investors, help existing investors and grow local companies.
