Customer Loyalty Leads to ‘Buried Treasure,’ Money-Making

Partners might be staring an untapped source of revenue right in the face.

Michael Schmidtmann, owner of Trans4mers, the sales leadership organization, says technology-services companies can yield huge benefits simply by increasing their footprint with existing customers. A happy customer presents a twofold opportunity: Partners can cross-sell and up-sell within the existing account and also glean beaming referrals.

Schmidtmann will share advice and strategies during his presentation, “Cracking the Customer Loyalty Code, ” part of the marketing and technology conference track, April 10, at the Channel Partners Conference & Expo in Las Vegas.

Schmidtmann educates technology solution providers about sales for his Trans4mers job and speaks at various industry events. He recently spoke to agents and MSPs about how they can and should collaborate with one another.

He took time to answer our questions about his upcoming talk. We edited the transcript for clarity.

Trans4mers’ Mike Schmidtmann

Channel Partners: No one would disagree with the sentiment that customer loyalty is important, but do channel partners traditionally do a good job with this?

Michael Schmidtmann: It’s not that channel partners don’t have customer loyalty; they do. It’s just they could be doing so much better if they employed better systems. Remember this insightful maxim: “Losers have goals. Winners have systems.” Everyone has goals, even underachieving organizations. Yes, the top organizations have goals, but so do the worst organizations. What separates elite organizations is the degree [to which] they utilize repeatable, executable systems to win and improve customer loyalty. It’s no accident they succeed. They do more than care and hope. They have systems that are ingrained in their culture, their metrics, their scorecards and their management processes.

CP: Do you have any real-life examples of a company that increased customer loyalty? How did they do it?

MS: I work with an organization in the Washington, D.C., area that has [more than] 1,000 customers. They offer six types of services, including network services, UCaaS, SD-WAN and managed services. If a customer loaded up on every service, that would be worth over $250 per customer employee. So a 100-person company would generate $25,000 in monthly recurring revenue. They were getting less than 10 percent of that number. They realized they could easily double or triple their business without winning a single new customer. They had to figure out how to effectively cross-sell and up-sell their existing customer base. They put many systems in place to accomplish this, which I will detail in my session. The net result is they’ve been doubling in size every three years for the past 10 years, and the growth rate is actually accelerating, not slowing down.

CP: What do you hope partners will take away from your talk?

MS: There is buried treasure in their existing customer base, and they haven’t scratched the surface of how to dig it out.