The New Rules of Repeat Selling

All of sales and marketing is obsessed with winning the next customer. Meanwhile, many businesses are hemorrhaging as many as one-in-four customers annually.

The simple message of delivering on promises and keeping existing customers is a familiar one for most managers, yet issues of customer service and satisfaction receive only lip service. Organizations need to tackle the apathy and complacency that surrounds their relationship with their existing base of clients.

The new rules of repeat sales are as follows:

1.   Fire half your sales force. The sad reality is that if companies got better at keeping their existing customers they could meet their growth targets with much fewer salespeople. If they applied the same sophistication to keeping customers as to winning new ones they would be much better off.

2.   Forget customer satisfaction. Marketing slogans love to talk about the importance of customer service and customer satisfaction, however it is only a red herring. Buyers have moved beyond satisfaction as the basis for selecting suppliers — they want suppliers that impact in a tangible way on the performance of their business.

3.   Forget responding to customer needs. Too many suppliers are playing catch-up in terms of changing customer needs and priorities. They are waiting for customers to tell them what they want, while competing suppliers are tempting them with innovative solutions, ideas and technologies.

4.   Forget account management. Account management is crawling rather than running in many companies, with basic elements, such as key account reviews and plans, severely lacking. Yet, remedying the deficiencies in account management is not going to be enough. Sellers need to develop, not just manage their accounts.

5.   Forget preferred supplier status. Suppliers are a dime a dozen in today’s competitive market space. The real test is to become so important to the customer as to be indispensable. That means to transition from supplier to strategic partner.

6.   Forget up-selling. Naturally, account reviews focus on selling more to the customer, however they neglect the basis upon which the next sale is predicated. That is the commitment of the supplier to meeting the customer’s needs. To meet sales targets suppliers need to show their customers how they can help them meet their own targets.

7.   Forget closing and moving on. Longer sales cycles mean that once the deal is closed the seller is under increasing pressure to find and close the next deal. However, the seller must stay involved post sale in order to ensure success.

8.   Forget marketing yourself. A testimonial or referral from a customer is worth dozens of adds, cold calls and marketing brochures. Yet, this powerful form of marketing is often overlooked by vendors.

Posted by Ray Collis on Aug 23 2011. Filed under Revolutionize Repeat Sales. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry