When was the last time you reached out to an existing or former customer hoping to make another sale? Have you bought leads, sent them one email and never reached out again? Or worse, bought the leads and never reached out to them at all?

If your answer is, “Um, I don’t really do much customer outreach or email marketing,” don’t feel bad. It just means you’re human.

Steve Rosenbaum understands. He’s a born salesman who “starts with the follow-up” but knows that “most businesses aren’t doing it. They’re ignoring the follow-up.”

And that means they’re leaving the easy money on the table. He points to statistics showing that if a company can improve its customer retention by as little as 5 percent, it can boost the bottom line by as much as 95 percent, Rosenbaum says.

Thanks to global supply chain disruptions, growing hostilities between the US and China, and rising import tariffs, U.S. companies are reconsidering a business plan that calls for them to outsource so much of their production to foreign companies in Asia. Instead, they are pivoting to onshoring back in the US, and “nearshoring” production in Mexico.

This new supply chain approach calls for sourcing products closer to home. For U.S. companies, that means setting up suppliers in Latin America — specifically, Mexico.

Mexico benefits from its geographic proximity to the U.S., its well-established export-oriented industrial sector, a labor force that values manufacturing jobs, and its inclusion in the US-Canada-Mexico North America free trade agreement, notes Forbes.

The move to Mexico is happening fast. Axios reports that the number of companies making moves to nearshore their production nearly tripled last year — to 42 percent of the companies polled, versus 17 percent in 2022 and just 11 percent in 2021.

Those companies join behemoths such as Walmart and automotive giants General Motors and Tesla that are already well on the way to bringing manufacturing closer to home.

With so many companies jumping on the nearshoring bandwagon, we asked two executives with experience working in Mexico for their advice. Klaus-Juergen Wolf, who has spent 15 years as a C-suite interim executive, and Jay Winkler, whose consulting company, Brave Lion Group, works with manufacturing firms, shared the following insights and suggested questions you should ask, concerns you should address, and the possible problems you could face if you nearshore production in Mexico.