The Chinasolved Compound has been buzzing with activity lately — working round the clock to revamp the 321 Profiles section and get a backlog of bios online. Due to the tireless efforts of the wizards at Reign Design (thanks Connie), the new content management system is up and looking good. If you haven’t visited the 321 section yet, take a look. If you are a regular visitor, please give us feedback on the new system and let us know if you find any glitches, bugs or problems.

Be sure to check out the new profiles.

Edward Lehman, one of the most respected voices in the Beijing legal community shares some thoughts about his 20 years of experience in China.

Rachel Sussman - also of Beijing - introduces us to Chinese Savvy, an online resource for learning about Chinese language and culture.

Marshal Taplits - a Shenzhen techie - talks about life in China and the challenges facing software implementation specialists in the PRD.

Finally its back to Shanghai for a word from Alex Cureton-Griffiths, Shanghai’s consumate networker and publisher of Shangahi Networking News — your first stop for information on networking and business events in the Shanghai area.

If you (or someone you know or even work for) would like to participate in a 321 Profile, please drop us a line. We are always looking for new views.

The recruiter from the HK bank in Shanghai certainly new what he or she was doing. Miss B was a great catch – recruited 3 months ago from the graduating class of one of Shanghai’s international universities. She was smart, personable, proactive and responsible. As we filled out the paperwork to set up my new accounts, she expertly up-sold me to a wider range of value-added products and helped me feel comfortable about starting what would probably be a very long-term business relationship. When I asked about her plans at the company, Miss B informed me that she had already given notice to quit. Why? She felt that the sales quotas applied to all new customer service reps were too much pressure, and she had lots of other options.

Unfortunately, this bank’s HR department needs to re-examine both its Training and Compensation policies – because both seem a bit inappropriate for this market.

Pre-hire Screening & Assessment
Miss B was sold on a completely different job than the one she ended up doing. She thought she’d be in the semi-glamorous world of international finance (when you’re a 23 year old recent grad, even banking can look kind of glamorous. I guess.). Instead she was convincing prospects to sign up for mortgages and car loans. I’m betting that this particular company has a VERY high turnover rate among its new recruits. Miss B was clearly not cut out for the job, and any decent sales manager should have seen that right off.

Orientation – They Gotta BELIEVE
Once she joined the company, the bank stopped recruiting Miss B and all of the other new hires. Mistake. That’s precisely when a recruit’s REAL ‘buy in’ needs to take place. She should have been such a fan of the company that she was willing to ride out any short-term bumps in the road to build her career with the bank. Instead she fizzled and fled in a matter of weeks. Win over your new hires, and you will have a much easier time fielding a team of experienced, competent staffers.

Sales Training – More than just paperwork.
Miss B received the kind of quick, process-oriented sales training that in-house supervisors are good at delivering. Older bureaucrats instructing new bureaucrats (bureaulings? bureaucrettes?) on the proper handling of forms and paperwork. If your people are doing heavy sales (50% of their REAL job description) then invest in some serious sales training that’s going to help them develop a proper attitude and goal-set. Miss B had no idea how to sell, and it quickly became the worst part of her job. With better skills, she may have stuck around long enough to get to like it (or at least not hate it as much).

Sales Quotas – Not for everyone
Quotas and other high-pressure performance requirements should be discussed early – and used as a screening test. Once your new staffers see one person quite because they couldn’t handle the pressure of a sales quota, it opens the door for others to leave as well. Quotas are for hard-core sellers only, and then should never be applied too early in someone’s career. In general, if you apply sales quotas you should screen early to make sure these folks see themselves as real sales-types. Otherwise, you are just setting yourself up for high-turnover and low morale.

Your China sales department can fill the role of Frontier Scout who helps your company find its way across unfamiliar terrain to reach your final destination – or it can be the trusty stevedore who handles the heavy lifting once you’ve arrived. Unfortunately for many of us the sales force can also act like reckless renegades that bring chaos and disorder with them every time they ride into town.

If you are the ex-pat manager charged with China sales responsibility, running a successful team here is very different from back home.

Sales team – Leaders or Followers?
That depends. If you are in manufacturing or run an operation that has a finite capacity, then you need a sales team that can take their cues from the head of operations. You don’t want them over-selling if they are just making promises that your company can’t meet.

If you are in a service business where capacity can be ramped up quickly, then your salespeople need to be out in front, filling the pipeline with a steady stream of new business – and reporting to management and marketing on customer demands and preference, pricing, and competitive analysis.

China Sales HR is management intensive
US sales forces tend to be highly independent, self-motivated, often unruly mobs of wanna-be alpha dogs. Management’s role is usually to rein them in when they get too wild, or to whip them up with a bonus or sales contest. In China sales teams tend to be a little more subdued. Sales is not a high-status position here, and many people just don’t really believe in the commission concept. Even those who want to sell often don’t understand the basic skills – or even the concepts – that are second nature in more developed markets. Recruitment is cumbersome, training is expensive and turnover is high in the sales department. You have to manage these guys closely. Here are a few ideas that will help even the odds.

Training
Salesmen in China need more training than in other places. In general, a China-based sales manager will probably be devoting at least 50% of his time to supervising / training. If the head of your department is spending 95% of his time making sales calls and dealing with customers, you are going to have a very hard time growing your department.
Sales training breaks down into 3 phases.

1)Orientation training. Explain how the basic sales function works, and how the salesman integrates with the rest of the company. I know it’s obvious to you. It might not be obvious to your new recruit. This is where you talk about your company mission, values and rules. Your kick-back & bribery talk should take place early – and avoid confusion, ambiguity and wiggle-room.
2)Skills training. Get a competent outside trainer and teach them the sales process. Even if they have sales experience, you still have to do this on a regular basis.
3)Development. This includes coaching, train-the-trainer, and career counseling. If you expect your decent sales people to stick around for more than a few months, you have to let them know where their careers are going.

Measurement Start with good, regular meetings. Good meetings are those that make each salesperson explain what will happen this week, what happened last week, and why last week was different from what they expected. They have to take place every week at the same time. If your sales manager is too busy to have regular sales meetings, then he is too busy to run a proper sales department.

You need to measure the right things. Measuring final sales is great, but it tends to be too late. Look at how many leads are coming in, how many of those are being CONVERTED into qualified prospects, and how many prospects are being CONVERTED into sales. That’s what we mean when we talk about conversion rates. You should also look at where your leads are coming from, and if they are growing in a predictable manner. I love CRM and other automated systems – once you have the processes down. Companies that try to impose order and process on their sales teams by installing expensive software systems almost always fail miserably.

Compensation
Salesmen should be paid for performance, but make sure that you are paying for the behaviors that you want to encourage. If you pay for sales, they will try to sell – but they won’t do paperwork, train new team members or report to marketing on new developments in the marketplace or among competitors. If you compensate the whole team on general sales levels you will see better action from your weak performers but less from you aggressive stars. You need to find a middle ground that satisfies your individual situation.

Quotas tend to increase turnover and drive new people out the door before they’ve had a chance to really learn their jobs. Don’t put sales quotas in place unless you have a strong training program and there is some kind of formal mentoring or coaching plan. Quotas work best when individual commission rates are high, the brand is a proven market winner and there is a long waiting list of new applicants for sales posts. If you don’t have that situation, consider scrapping the quota system for now.

As your China business gets larger, you have to worry about 2 contradicting HR trends. On the one hand there is the issue of staff bloat. Chinese admin and clerical staffs tend to get real big, real fast. If you decide to localize management, you also have to worry about top-heavy teams that have lots of chiefs but not enough Indians. On the other hand you also face the danger of shortages in middle managers and experienced execution people. If you’re a cartoonist for Playboy, big on the top and the bottom with a narrow middle works out just fine. If you’re running a China business, it’s a disaster.

Economies of scale: Good
When your company has 10 staffers you might hire someone devoted to HR – and pay him or her 5,000 per month. As your staff size increases to 25 people, you give your HR manager a raise and hire an assistant. Now you’re up to 10,000 per month. First your HR staffing costs were 500 rmb per employee per month. You ended up with an HR (staffing) cost of 400 rmb per head per month. That’s what we mean by economy of scale – when your company gets more efficient by being larger. It usually happens in Marketing, Operations and can happen in certain types of Administrative costs. Whether or not it happens in Sales depends on how you are managing the department.

Diseconomies of scale: Bad
You SHOULD notice something as your staff grows above 20 people. When your staff is lean and mean, everyone is pitching in to support the bottom line or is directly contributing or enabling others to make the company money. But as you get big, suddenly you’ve got assistants who just seem to do paperwork or managers who just supervise others. This is an issue with all organizations, but China is a society run by little fiefdoms and bureaucrats – so it can become a dire situation if you let it. Watch the number of assistants you are adding to each department, and be careful about adding layers of management or supervisors. If your company has one location and less than 100 people, you need a pretty good reason to have more than 3 levels of managers under the top guy.

In China, diseconomies of scale start tall and then get wide. For example: let’s say you publish computer programs and your top software writer wants a promotion. You make him a manager – and give him an assistant. Then you let him appoint a couple of supervisors to manager the code-writers and the assistants. And the supervisors need an assistant. And when there are 4 or 5 supervisors, someone will say that you need an assistant manager to supervise the supervisors…. Part of this is normal, healthy growth – but a lot of this is internal political wrangling and status glomming. Remember – in this example the only ones making you money are the coders and programmers. Everyone else is a cost.

What about Sales?
Is Sales an economy or diseconomy of scale? Depends. If each new salesman is leveraging off company resources to add more revenues than costs, then you are doing ok. A classical economist would tell you that as long as he is adding one rmb more than he is costing you it is worthwhile to add that new salesman, but classical economists say lots of things that aren’t really worth listening too. In fact, sales departments have LOTS of hidden costs and can be a black hole of time, resources and managerial energy if you let them. Sales teams can lead your organization to new heights, or they can drag you down into the muck.

Take this quick quiz:
Look at your top-line revenue for each of the last 6 months. Now look at your profits. Month-to-month, your profits should be growing faster than your revenue. In other words, not only should profits be growing, but they should be outpacing revenue. That’s how you can tell if your company is leveraging its resources to grow in an efficient manner. If revenue growth is outpacing profits, you are running faster just to stay in the same place – which is a lousy recipe for progress.

Next: Making the Sales Department more efficient

You are the sales manager at a 3 year old ex-pat managed service business in a major Chinese city. In Year 1 you had 1 salesman. By the end of Year 2 you had 5 salesmen. At the close of Year 3 you had 10 salesmen. How many salesmen might you employ by the end of your next year of operations?

A) 15
B) 20
C) 7

If you answered A) 15, you might be in for a rough ride. The real answer is probably closer to 20 – which means you may have to hire 15 new recruits just to keep up with attrition and turnover.

There are three kinds of growth trends in business. Arithmetic growth is the simple kind that most of us are familiar with. It starts with a base number, and simple adds increments. Last year you had one child, this year you will have another, so that makes 2. 1+1 = 2.

The second kind of growth is more important to international managers in China’s rapidly growing service market. This is exponential growth. You have 2 satisfied customers, and each one refers you to 2 more satisfied customers, which leads to 4 new customers, for a total of 6 by the end of the year (assuming you hold on to your original 2). 2 grows to 6. This is how large populations or networks function – and it is the best way to understand how emerging markets –like China- grow. It is also how sales & marketing teams grow.

What about the third kind of growth – commonly known as “negative growth” in finance and commerce, or SHRINKING in daily life? That’s what occurs when you have 2 DISATISFIED customers, who tell their associates. Now your sales efforts become LESS effective over time, and you have to expend more effort to secure each new customer. 2+2=3. You are spending more, but earning less.

Staying fully staffed in China means dealing with two kinds of demand: Attrition, promotion and job-hopping is one cause for continuous recruiting, and growth in market & organizational demand is another. Don’t make the mistake of under-planning for your company’s HR needs, or you will spend your entire China career racing just to stay in place.

International managers who travel a lot should try this quick and frightening exercise: Call your business’ main phone number during regular business hours to test the quality of your company’s first contact with the outside world. Clear, professional & friendly? Good for you.

Next time you travel out of town – particularly if you leave the country – try the same thing. Any difference?

If standards are slipping when you leave the office, then your team is undermining all of your hard work and brand-building efforts. Anything you can do about it?

This is becoming a crucial problem for more and more ex-pat and international managers in China. As business picks up, the Boss finds he is spending lots of time away from the office. None of the bright young salespeople seem capable of consistently closing sales, so the responsibility has devolved to YOU! There’s nothing wrong or even strange about that – even Fortune 500 CEOs routinely describe themselves as the company’s #1 salesman. But when the heads of Oracle, GE and Ford leave their headquarters for the afternoon, the company handbook doesn’t immediately start getting used as a pillow. (Well, maybe at Ford.)

There’s an old joke about a western owner of an overseas factory who returns after a 4 day business trip to find that all of his workers are sitting in the dark among the idle machines. When he asks why, one of the senior workers answers, “no one told us to flip the switch”. It’s a funny story – unless you are that owner.

What can you do to address this particular problem? I’ve got a 3 step program for you: Measure, Train, Reward.

1) Measure the problem – if there is one. Things might be going great, and you can skip over the rest of this confident that your team will support your efforts through thick and thin. For the rest of us, you need to figure out ways to measure the performance of your team when you’re not around. Calling in from the road is basic – but listen carefully to the responses. If you hear a sleepy voice say, ‘hello?’ after 4 rings instead of the usually crisp and alert, ‘Globo World Enterprises, how may I help you this morning?’ then you are learning something important. Deal with it. As my wacky neighbor used to say, ‘Ex-pat denial is the Devil’s jet-ski’. There are lots of ways to measure performance while you’re out of the office — from secret shoppers and hidden cameras to a snitchy personal assistant. A thoughtfully designed “to-do” list of useful projects that you would like to see completed in your absence can probably serve the same purpose (though it’s boring). The key here to gauge whether or not productivity drops to an unacceptable level while you’re gone. (Warning: Some managers have found that productivity actually improves when they are gone. Go figure.)

2) Train an office manager. Well, actually you’ve got two training options. First, you can train a sales manager or purchasing manager to make some of those trips that are absenting you from your office in the first place. But for many us international types, you stand a better chance training a dedicated office manager who is going to keep the mid & entry level troops hopping when you’re gone. (If your senior people are slacking while you’re slogging, you’ve got other, bigger problems.) Tag an experienced staffer who you want to hold on to with the promotion to Senior Office Manager, bump her pay by at least 25% and send her to two types of outside training programs: Time Management, and Train the Trainer (in that order). It is now her responsibility to oversee the operation in your absence. Ironically, the rest of the staff won’t resent or hate her for her new dictatorial ways – she’ll blame you and the rest of the team will unite in their intensified hatred of you. But I digress…

3) Compensate accordingly. If it turns out that everything is just rosy when you leave town and there is no change to the situation, then you can ignore this step. But if your new system is indeed affecting a change in office behavior then you should reinforce it with cash, food, or prizes. This being China, food probably works best. Give your office manager the budget to splash out for a nice lunch or afternoon tea break (the kind with the jello-chunks seems to work best) in your absence.

If things go well, office efficiency and QC will be more stable, your staff will be sorry to see you return!

Ex-pat entrepreneurs who have set up successful China-based businesses often find that they are spending more and more of their time managing a growing sales team that they don’t really understand. These exp-pat business owners and managers tend to be energetic, creative, and ambitious individuals who all have big plans for China. But successful entrepreneurs have to become effective mangers – and they are struggling with the challenges of running their sales teams.

Sales management for non-sales professionals can be a real headache. Here are five ideas that may make your life a little easier – or at least more profitable.

Sales management for non-sales people starts with these 5 areas.

1) Managing & goal setting
2) Recruiting & Hiring
3) Structuring the department
4) Training & Coaching
5) Payment & Compensation

Managing – Salesmen can be jerks – anywhere in the world. Being aggressive and determined and focused makes them effective salespeople – but lousy colleagues. Don’t let these people bully you or con you, as they will try to do. Salesmen are goal-driven, and sales management is about setting good goals and making sure that they get met.

Recruiting & Hiring – You want to find the middle between 2 extreme sales-type personalities. Aggressive salesmen will convince you that they have all the answers, but they tend to cut corners and will probably disrupt your operation. If you go the other way and hire a friendly “relationship” salesman, you are sure to enjoy their company but you won’t get rich paying them to “network” all day. HINT: Pay a little more and hire someone with a few years of sales experience IN YOUR BUSINESS. Develop them to be your sales manager.

Structure the department. - Structure develops whether you put it in place or not. If you organize the sales department according to your own plans, it may be very effective for you. If you allow your Chinese sales department’s structure to “just evolve naturally”, it will be effective for someone else. In China, you should always know where you want people to rise to. Have their promotions in mind and be more proactive than you would be in the US.

Training & Coaching – You do the product training. Bring in pros to do the sales training. Your job as a coach is to make sure that the training has an impact. It’s best if your coaching relationships with your team are warm and cozy and life affirming – but it’s not necessary. Weekly, scheduled meetings to review performance and set goals is fine. Delegation is an important part of coaching, but requires regular feedback.

Payment, Compensation and Rewards. Commission and performance based compensation plans work well. But you also have to be ready to fire the under-performers. When compensating sales teams, make sure that you are identifying and rewarding appropriate behaviors.

True or False: A bad decision is better than no decision.

If you are a typical US manager, you’ll say Yes.
A traditional Chinese manager would probably say No.
A European manager would probably want to spend the afternoon discussing what you mean by ‘bad decision’, ‘no decision’ and ‘better’.

None of those answers is necessarily wrong – unless you are assuming that the other people in your organization should be responding in one way, but they actually respond differently.

Orthodox US management theory states that a bad decision is better than no decision for three reasons. 1) You can correct a bad decision later. Its progress as far as PROCESS goes. 2) Inertia is a real danger in and of itself. Organizations die if they don’t move forward. Leadership requires risk, and bad decisions are a part of normal management. 3) Even bad decisions will improve the organization because they help management learn and make the company smarter.

Orthodox Chinese management theory states that no decision is better than a bad decision for 3 reasons. 1) Patience is good. If you wait, you will get more information and you have the opportunity to ask for guidance from others. 2) Risk is bad. Delays are cost-neutral, but mistakes are expensive for the organization. 3) Risk is worse. Individual managers can’t be faulted for waiting, but they can be penalized for mistakes. Smart managers spread the risk and kick the tough decisions upstairs.

Orthodox European management theory states that there is no orthodox European management theory. Complexity should be embraced. Consensus should be the goal. Coffee should be ordered. There are always more options to be explored, different viewpoints to be heard and new solutions to be synthesized.

What does this mean to the ex-pat manager in China? Your assumptions about risk, reward and corporate culture should be made as EXPLICIT as possible as early as possible. Consensus seeking groups can come up with an optimal solution to a business problem – if everyone is committed to such an outcome. Hard driving American-style risk-taking can have great results – if the corporate culture GENUINELY embraces risk and allows for failure – but traditional Chinese managers will need coaching and guidance at the beginning. And risk-averse upwards delegation can work – if the company doesn’t face critical deadlines and top management is both hands-on and open to the process.

BUT – when senior management ASSUMES that its style of decision-making is universal and mid-level managers don’t share that approach, the results will be disastrous. Every time.

I’ve been spending more of my time helping China-based teams to develop effective negotiating strategies lately. The new hot management trend in China is to hire sales experts to train purchasing and procurement teams in negotiation. Many ex-pat managers have been increasingly dissatisfied with their organization’s ability to procure goods and services in an efficient, predictable, consistent manner.

I have a pretty good idea why. They are engaging in some pretty startling Lose-Lose negotiating techniques.

Lose-Lose Denial
I usually start out my workshops by introducing the concepts of Win-Win, Win-Lose and Lose-Lose. People in China get “Win-Lose” right away, since this is standard operating procedure. They PRETEND to get “Win-Win” since it is a management buzzword and they are conditioned to nod knowingly when they hear one. But “Lose-Lose” is a puzzler for them, and I’m usually informed that no one would ever choose to engage in this kind of negotiation. Ok.

Pattern of Distrust
These same professional buyers will later tell me that they give as little information as possible to salesmen – and many intentionally mislead or obscure their true needs. Indeed, they approach salesmen with a mixture of dread and contempt. To many Chinese procurement and purchasing people, the sales relationship is mortal combat – an intricate chess match where each side matches wits to wrest tiny gains from the other until a slip or blunder opens up an opportunity to slay their evil rival and move on to a new opponent.

Since the ‘other side’ is out to cheat and defeat the noble purchaser, nothing they say can be trusted or relied upon. Far from being experts in the industry, the salesman’s only skill is in cheating, lying and undermining. The less the suppliers know about the purchaser’s business the better. A long-term relationship would only weaken the buyer’s negotiating position.

Breaking the Cycle
Managers in China have to help their procurement people and technical buyers break the cycle of one-off purchases and price-cut tunnel vision. Businesses in China are notorious for wasting money on purchases that have a low price tag but don’t serve the needs of the company. This is one of the reasons that quality control is such a continual battle here.

Five things you can start doing to improve procurement:

Performance measurement. Many managers are still assessing their procurement process on the “absence of noise” principal – the less they hear about it, the better it must be working. You need a standard for judging the effectiveness of your purchasing team. That means developing a system for judging the quality and service of your suppliers. HINT: If procurement, QC and operations are handled by the same team, you are going to get bad results.

Non-price criteria. Low prices are great – unless they are very expensive. Purchasers who bargain solely on price tend to end up with products and services that don’t fit the needs of their company. Unless your people are buying bags of cement or tons of sand, there are probably going to be non-price criteria that indicate the effectiveness of the transaction. Don’t be mao-wise but renmenbi-foolish on an organizational level.

Key supplier programs. Encourage your buyers and department heads to develop long term relationships with suppliers, consultants and vendors. One-off sales are almost always the most expensive. Your partners should be providing expertise, advice and industry or product knowledge. A revolving door in the purchasing department makes it impossible for suppliers to add serious value.

End-use expertise. Do your buyers know how the products or services they are negotiating for will be used? Purchasing departments in China are famous for cutting prices by degrading quality or dispensing with useful features. The most typical example is the service contract on industrial machinery or upgrades on software. I’ve heard of purchasers cutting a few per-cent at the point of purchase, but gutting the value of the product or service the company is buying.

Jump the Queue. Get to know some of your consultants or suppliers – particularly in sensitive areas or where you’ve noticed high turnover or big swings in Accounts Payable. The partners you are buying from should be experts who can speak knowledgably about industry trends, competitive developments and technological innovations. Once you get them talking, they can also tell you interesting things about your own procurement process. It just might be a very interesting conversation.

The ex-pat manager’s conundrum in China: how do you protect your IP when your IP is both your product and your sales pitch? For many service-oriented businesses, the very ideas that they are guarding from being stolen must be displayed and discussed in order to promote their business. No one will buy a design or consulting service if they have no idea about what the designer or consultant is talking about. But once that designer or consultant describes his creative ideas, he is in danger of having those ideas pilfered.

What can you do to protect yourself but still get your brand ‘out there’?

First of all, get used to the idea that your designs, models, concepts and IP will get adapted by others. That’s what being a market leader is all about. You have to find ways to use that trend instead of fighting it. I was once on a roundtable panel with a stock analyst who refused to divulge his company’s recommendations. He looked like a fool, and no one understood why he got involved when all he did was waste everyone’s time. If you want to promote your IP, you have to reveal some of it.

If you make iPods, you have to target people who appreciate the difference between fakes and real things. Apple sells to three groups of people: 1) Fashion conscious people who like being on the cutting edge, 2) Genuine technophiles who appreciate the quality of their design and engineering and 3) Community members who value the software, upgrades and support they get from the Apple brand. Apple knows it will never sell to the rmb 150 fake market – and they don’t try. They offer value to the top of the market, and are willing to forgo the rest.

Five quick ideas for promoting your IP without losing your shirt – or your sanity.

1) Identify your target customer profile. Pre-qualify leads, and say “no” to inquiries who can’t meet your basic requirements. I’ve stopped sending detailed proposals to anonymous callers, free-email addresses and low-level “data-collectors”. Make your first call about getting the meeting with the decision makers.

2) Let the pirates build and educate your market. Do it the “Microsoft way”. They were ripped off for years – but those 8 rmb-per-disk dirt-bags ended up building their brand and making Windows the hands-down standard. Rip-offs hurt your pride and make you angry – but they are also promoting your ideas and teaching potential buyers about your industry.

3) Customer service and marketing. These are the Achilles Heel of the pirates and rip-off artists. Make sure you are building a community of buyers around a strong brand that is committed to service and quality.

4) Shine a light on it. Make “as stolen by …” part of your marketing approach! The customers you should be targeting won’t bother with cut-rate rip-offs, but sometimes they’ll buy from them without knowing it. Talk about how you have become the industry leader and that others have already started stealing your ideas. Then discuss the areas where your quality is better, and where you are moving ahead.

5) Keep it new. Stay ahead of the curve by setting the pace – and keep it brisk. Let your old clients know when you have upgraded or modernized your offering. That’s the strongest way to stay in touch with existing clients and build a community around your brand.