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Growth isn’t just about winning new business; it’s also about maintaining your existing customer base; because if your customers are leaving at the same rate as you’re winning business, you’re basically running on a treadmill! And, you probably resemble the hamster going nowhere rather than the athlete getting fitter.
You need to leverage your existing customer base to build your new customer base. The more you think of your customers as an important part of your business development team, the more you realise how important it is to spend time with them executing great retention strategies. Excellent customer service after the sale is what drives loyalty and advocacy. Yet, so little time is spent developing and executing strategies for connecting with customers after the sale.
5 Ideas to Build Sales Excellence as a Business Habit
Strategy # 1 – Get Honest About Current Retention Levels
One of the reasons why salespeople can be perceived as self-centred is their tendency to disappear once the sale is completed. Basically, they work hard to build a relationship to make the sale, but once that’s done they drop the customer like a sack of potatoes and move on to the next opportunity. I can hear the thousands of you that read these blogs saying, “Not me – I care about my customers.” But, I want to challenge you on that. Seriously – how many of the people you’ve sold to have you connected with post-sale purely to further develop the relationship?
Go through your diary and see how many of your meetings and calls over the past month were about retention, and driven by you (not by a customer request or a desire to sell something). If you do have this sort of activity in the diary, how does it compare to the size of your customer base? Would that number enable you to connect with each of your customers once a quarter? My point is to get honest about how often you’re connecting with your customers to achieve the outcome of retention above sales.
Strategy # 2 – On-Boarding Surprises
When a customer chooses a new supplier or buys a new solution a part of their mind will doubt their decision. A great way to confirm they made the right choice is to surprise them with something in the first 30 days after they’ve made the purchase. As an example, Lexus sent my wife tickets to a horseracing event not long after she bought her car. A very successful mortgage broker I work with sends a beautiful custom congratulations card to every homeowner the day before they settle into their new home, so that it’s one of the first pieces of mail they get. What do you do - or what could you do - to surprise your customers within 30 days of completing their first purchase from you.
Strategy # 3 – Share Something Valuable
People are always looking to get more out of what they purchased. When salespeople follow up with ideas on how to do that, they step into the “trusted adviser” space. If you sell accounting software, you might share information on how other businesses are integrating your technology with their CRM or their banking feeds to improve efficiencies. If you sell mobile advertising campaigns, you might share information on campaigns that won awards even if you didn’t create those campaigns. If you sell fitness equipment, you might share information on nutrition strategies for getting the most out of your exercise. The point I’m making here is that no matter what you sell, there’s almost always valuable information you can share with your customer base. If you make this a sales habit, it becomes very easy to connect with each of your customers every quarter.
Strategy # 4 – Referrals
If you’re in B2B sales, make a habit of asking with whom they do business, and what sort of customers they’re targeting. This knowledge will often enable you to spot an opportunity for them and make a recommendation to their business. This improves retention and it also increases the probability that you’ll transform the customer relationship into a referral relationship. How many of your customers have you referred business to over the past month? If you find this difficult just get out your customer list and ask, “”Which of my customers would like to meet each other?”. You can also do this with other salespeople in the team by brainstorming which customers in their list would like to meet or do business with the customers on your list.
Strategy # 5 – Do Coffee!
If you truly want to drive growth through both loyalty (retention) and advocacy you need to be talking to your customers face to face from time to time. You have growth targets, so do they, you’ll be surprised at how many customers are happy to spend 30 minutes over a coffee discussing the potential to refer business to one another, for example. Common ground comes up in casual conversation. If you’re having challenges with this or you want specific strategies for generating meetings, make sure you touch base with us to find out how we can help.
When you execute deliberate, broad and consistent client retention strategies it’s approximately five times easier to sell to an existing customer and four times more likely you’ll close a referred lead. It doesn’t make sense to be too busy cold calling to make this activity a priority. The bottom line is that you need to be the athlete confidently striding forward and running towards success rather than the hamster stuck on the treadmill!
Why not also check out this paper on the 5 Secrets For Building A Customer Centric Business
Dean Mannix is a Founding Director and Principal Consultant at SalesITV – Australia’s leading online sales and customer service training company. He has over 20 years of legal, finance, sales and management experience and is regarded as one of Australia’s leading performance consultants. Connect with him on LinkedIn.
