ONE of the first things that any marketing student will learn is that it costs on average eight times as much to win a new customer as to retain an existing one A bit like football where it is easier to stay in a division than it is to win promotion.

The message for businesses is very clear and even more so in troubled economic times – do everything that you can to keep your existing customers. A good customer is like gold dust and should be treated as such.

Working within BNI we should regard our fellow members as valued customers with whom we build long term relationships to mutual benefit.

The great differentiator of the BNI is that our networking is relationship based in contrast with other networking groups which are much more akin to one night stands.

It has been said that businesses are either product or customer led. In simple terms a product led business has a product or service that it then tries to find customers to which it can sell.

On the other hand a customer led business makes real efforts to discover what its customers want and sets out to meet that need.

There are no prizes for guessing that it is the second kind of business that can expect to do best.

We live in a world that is full of businesses that fail despite providing an excellent product or service that no one seems to want to buy.

As the saying goes – there is no point in having the best white shirts in the world if no one wants to buy white shirts.

Growth is the entirely laudable objective of most businesses but this should come on a solid foundation.

Expansion that leaves behind its existing customers and leaves them unhappy is a recipe for failure.

Toyota will pay a heavy price for leaving millions of unhappy customers as a result of a bid for growth that has left its core values or reliability and build quality on the hard shoulder.

To get the best out of BNI we remain faithful to the core values of “givers gain” of “farming rather than hunting..