What is a K.A.R.E Plan?

A K.A.R.E plan sorts your customers and prospects into four groups, each needing a different kind of attention. The letters stand for Keep, Attain, Recapture and Expand.

1. Keep. Existing customers who are profitable and worth protecting. The work here is retention: service quality, regular contact, spotting dissatisfaction before it becomes a departure.
2. Attain. Prospects who match your best customers but haven't bought yet. This is new business, and it's the most expensive of the four.
3. Recapture. Former customers, and prospects who went elsewhere. They know you, they've already been through your process, and something changed. Often the cheapest revenue available and the most neglected.
4. Expand. Existing customers buying more, whether that's additional services, other departments or other sites. Usually the highest margin, because there's no acquisition cost.

Why the split matters

Most businesses put nearly everything into Attain, because new business feels like growth and the other three feel like admin. That's an expensive habit. Winning a new customer costs considerably more than expanding an existing one, and neither Recapture nor Expand needs the same volume of lead generation spend behind it.

Splitting your plan four ways forces two useful questions. What percentage of your revenue is at risk if a Keep account leaves. And what would happen if you put the same effort into Expand that you currently put into Attain.

Building one

List your customers and prospects. Assign each to a category. Then for each category define what activity it needs, who owns it and how you'll measure it. Keep and Expand usually belong to whoever manages the relationship. Attain belongs to marketing and new business. Recapture usually belongs to nobody, which is why it rarely happens.

The plan is only useful if the categories drive different activity. If all four get the same newsletter, you have a list rather than a plan.

K.A.R.E versus a standard account plan

A traditional account plan covers what you'll do with one customer. A K.A.R.E plan covers how your effort is distributed across the whole base. One is depth, the other is allocation. Larger accounts need both.

K.A.R.E versus a sales pipeline

Your pipeline holds active opportunities. A K.A.R.E plan covers everyone, including customers with nothing open and former customers who aren't in your pipeline at all. That's the point. Recapture revenue exists precisely because those people have fallen out of every system you look at weekly.

We build these as part of our sales management work, usually alongside automation so each category gets its own communication without anyone having to remember.