I spend a lot of time talking about getting new clients. But the fact is, at least 50% of your revenue should be from past clients through new work – or the the referrals they send you.

In fact, after I’ve completed a client engagement, the next conversation I always have with the client is about how they are staying in contact with their past clients. The answers I get are depressing.

Denny Hatch, with Target Marketing Mag tells a great story about this topic. It was passed on to him by legendary direct marketer Bob Hemmings…and makes a handful-of great points about how important your past clients are.

The story goes like this.

More than half a century ago, Bob Hemming worked for a jeweler in New York’s West 47th St. diamond district. There, merchants rent counters and window space in a kind of giant co-op. Every evening, all the jewelers would dutifully take their diamonds out of the windows and showcases and lock them in the safe until the next morning.

All the jewelers, that is, except for Hemmings’s boss, who’d leave his diamonds out all night and put his customer list in the safe.

When asked his boss replied – “If I lose the diamonds, the insurance company will pay,” “If I lose my customer list, I’m out of business.”

Your clients are just as important to you – today – as they were to Hemmings boss back in the early 1900’s.

So here are few gems that Denny passes along.

• The main business of business is acquiring customers and then doing your very best to continually delight them.
• Customers are the lifeblood of every business. If you don’t have customers, you don’t have a business.
• This truism holds in boom times and even better in bust times (like now).
• When a business is sold, the lion’s share of the price is for the customer base.
• Every new customer represents increase share of market.
• Once a new customer is in the fold, the next challenge is to increase “share of wallet”—make wonderful offers to that customer so more and more money is spent with you (and not with the competition).
• A basic rule of business: It costs five to 10 times as much to acquire a new customer as it does to sell services to an existing customer.

So, I ask you….what are you doing to keep in contact with your clients?