Fast marketing promotions and offers make you look cheap, but they only bring you short clients

There it is again, a call from KPN, the Dutch telecoms company. Do I have a moment? Not really, but what is it about? Well, whether I might be interested in a great offer after all. KPN has called me with an offer plenty of times before.

It would be very much to my advantage. "But this really is a good deal. Because if you do this now, you get Netflix for free, and you get the bundle discount, and you get a five-year price guarantee, and you get a really low price."

"What are you paying now?"

Well, I pay 450 euros a year for internet, excluding VAT. I'm with Freedom, everything works fine, nothing needs to change. So if you can deliver the same for less, that's an option.

"Yes, we can do that. Let me work it out for you."

Anyway. A long story about how it can be cheaper at KPN, the bundling, this and that. So obviously that is the very best option. And then a salesperson like that also slides back and forth between amounts with and without VAT, whichever suits him. And when I finally take the trouble to work it all out, because I don't understand a thing about what they are actually calculating or how it works, it turns out their base prices are simply higher.

And that is exactly what KPN is. Already in 2001. Back then I worked at an agency that had KPN as a client.

And what does KPN do, constantly? Promotions, promotions, promotions. All year round they are running promotions.

It is now 2026. It is exactly the same.

Because those promotions have to be paid for somehow. And every time you need a new reason to approach existing and new clients. So you invent another promotion, and you keep the base price high. Then there is always a slice you can take off and call it an offer.

While their price is simply too high to begin with.

I had to sit down and work it out myself to see that. But these days clients increasingly just ask ChatGPT or Claude: how is this price actually put together? And then KPN is found out just as quickly.

A quick marketing promotion. A good offer, a discount, a campaign. And it works: you get a spike in sales.

And after that?

After that, we'll see. Until tomorrow, when you need another campaign for the next spike.

That is what I call short clients. XS-clients. If those are what you are after, you run promotions. Campaigns. Reactivation. People who signed up somewhere once suddenly get something nice from you. It is a trick to pull back people you have neglected all along. No contact, nothing delivered, no value. And then you briefly turn a non-client back into a small client.

Does that fit the organisation you want to be?

And ask yourself what your clients make of it. How loyal are they, really? Your promotion has to be better and prettier and more attractive than all the other promotions, and there are plenty of those, because your competitor is doing exactly the same. And your client may not be anywhere near the point of buying just then.

Sometimes short clients are simply the right call. If you have shareholders, as KPN does, and you need short-run results, if you have debt to service or financial promises to keep, if you need cash now, then this is one way to do it. A legitimate one. The only question is whether it fits the company you are, and whether you will not need those clients later to build out your product and your services.

Because long clients are something else. They deliver value to you over a long time, and you deliver value to them over a long time. On my site I call them XL-clients. Serve a client like that for five or ten years and your role changes. You stop being a supplier carrying out instructions and become someone who thinks along with your client's ambition. That step from supplier to partner position is exactly where the profit sits, because an indispensable partner cannot be swapped out and a supplier can.

I have one client relationship that has brought in more than a million over the years.

That sounds like a lot. But do the maths. If the whole relationship runs ten years and you deliver mutual value the entire time, you get there. That is doable. A hundred thousand certainly is. Run that very fast short client promotion instead and you need a great many of them, they pay a hundred or two hundred euros, and then they are gone. And you start over.

There is something else in it that you cannot buy any other way. Long clients see what is happening in the market. They keep you up to date, they tell you what is going on, and you can simply ask them what they see. That is a very different thing from buying market research because you have a target to hit in two months. With a long client it also runs both ways: you see what other clients are doing, so you can hand that knowledge straight back, with no hidden agenda. That is how you innovate together with the clients you already have.

And right now that counts. When it comes to innovation, the use of AI for instance, you need those clients badly. Loyal clients you can ask what is a realistic option for them and what brings them closer to their expansion. That is exactly the part AI does not take over from you. Standard work gets cheaper and more widely available, and that will continue. A partner-level client relationship does not.

Meanwhile it does something to your own company. With long clients you grow steadily. Your profit becomes predictable, your company becomes predictable, and that makes your company worth more. You notice it the moment something is at stake. If you need a loan, predictable revenue from long-running client relationships is a very different thing from a series of campaigns. A campaign is predictable up to a point, but that depends on how much money you throw at it, and if you miss one, or two, or three, that is the end of it. If you want to expand into another country or serve another segment, you can finance part of that yourself. And you take the experience from the market with you.

So campaigns are not the problem. They are useful to prompt, to shift behaviour, to get attention for a moment, and if you have a new product there is nothing wrong with a campaign around it. But then it comes on top of the relationship you already have with your clients, not instead of it. Sometimes you even run it only to your existing clients, and expand later.

So what kind of company do you want to be? One that has to go hunting again every month? Or one that grows with clients who stay, and that needs only a handful of long clients to build its expansion on?

Short clients or long clients is a strategic choice. And that choice determines everything that comes after.

Are you working on expansion and want to know how to get more lasting profit out of your existing client relationships?