I’ve had three different people ask me to write about retention strategies in recent weeks. I’m not exactly swimming in specific reader inquiries, so three identical requests qualifies as a critical mass in my little blogging world.

I’ve started thinking about what, if any, retention strategies we have in place here at Cressey Sports Performance…and I’ve come to a conclusion:

I hate the term ”retention strategies.”

The problem isn’t that I’m opposed to implementing processes that promote the retention of paying customers; the problem is that I don’t differentiate between “running my business” and “retention strategies.”

The way I see it, there are strategies geared toward client acquisition, and then every moment of delivering our training services should align strategically with our efforts to retain clients. We don’t need a creative new approach sitting in our back pocket waiting to be used when things begin going downhill and clients stop spending money with us…if that happens, we need a new approach to delivering our training services entirely.

If I find a strategy that helps me reduce the number of athletes that leave our business I don’t call it a retention strategy – I implement it in a full-time format as a business process and start referring to it as “how we run CSP.”

If you look at it that way, what my staff would refer to as “quality fitness instruction” is actually just our retention strategy in action.