Amy Bermar, Founder and President of our 2007 Top Small Workplace Corporate Ink, a Massachusetts-based PR firm, has a thoughtful new post on her company blog.  It's the first of three posts she's contributing to PR Week's Insider Blog.

In it, she argues that when customers or clients leave, leaders' easiest justifications for this include executive transition, inferior marketing, competitive mergers, and not enough control over sales.  But ultimately, Bermar writes,

The simple answer is that any time a client cuts back – even if they keep you – it's because you're not delivering the kind of results that put that question off-limits.

Why do some (certainly not all) leaders find it hard to go to this reason for customer churn first?  After all, in terms of the effort and energy leaders and managers expend on employee engagement, when it's clear someone is not producing the results needed by the company, the first reaction is often to terminate that person.  (In fact, "firing fast" is a cost-saving best practice of our award-winning small firms.)

So instead of grasping at straws and perhaps wasting more time and money by getting into the minutia of the relationship of a customer or client who's defected, consider your organization's value proposition.

Related: Bermar writes from experience in her post.  We shared in our Success Story on Corporate Ink how frank and honest communications team building helped her firm weather a particularly tough industry downturn a few years ago – and emerge stronger for the experience.

Photo credit: Corporateinklings blog