Get keep and grow your customers

A few months ago I joined something that used a subscription business model with a required an up front payment and a supplementary minimum payment for add on products. What seemed like a good idea at the time ( a New Year's resolution), like so many of them,turned out to be an expensive, inconvenient waste so I quit. Of course, the model required 30 days notice , so they got me for another monthly payment. Now I feel stupid.

About a week after quitting, I got an email asking why I quit. Do you think I replied? It's like asking someone who quit working for you to participate in an exit interview. Enough already.

On the other hand, I subscribe to a prominent business magazine and their VP for Research asked me to participate in a forum providing them with feedback. If I complete it, I get a $75 Amazon gift card. No problem.

Here are the things that make some subscription business models work or not.

Whether you use this kind of model or not, every company or professional service provider, like private practitioners, need a way to get, keep and grow customer-patients.

In sick care, or for digital health or other companies, there are two flavors of the VP for Research. One, the VP for Clinical Research, is tasked with proving the clinical validity of your solution or developing new products. The other, the VP for Customer Research, is tasked with "getting out of the building" to be sure that you still have the right market-product fit , and, if not, how your value proposition or business model canvas should be changed. The key is to do it while you still have customers, not after you lose them, when the horse has already left the barn. By then it is too little interest, too late

The same holds true for investors, suppliers or crowds when you are doing crowd funding. Filling the funnel is the first step. Moving prospects to customes is the next and keep those customers and making them your sales forceavangelists and influencers is the next.

The customer relationship model should be an hour glass, not a funnel. The game does not end when you find and get a customer-patient, it just begins. It is much cheaper to sell products to existing customers than finding new ones. Sure, when a patient leaves your practice or a customer switches to another product, you can ask them why. Just don't expect them to reply or give you a truthful answer. They already feel stupid enough and a horse's ass for making a bad decision.

Arlen Meyers, MD, MBA is the President and CEO of the Society of Physician Entrepreneurs on Twitter@ArlenMD and Co-editor of Digital Health Entrepreneurship