Neglect This Group, Ignore Revenue Growth Opportunities
In sales, much of our focus is often directed toward new client acquisition with prospecting and moving qualified opportunities through the sales process—and, for the most part, it should be. After all, how can you grow your businesses if you aren’t perpetually attracting and closing new customers?
In sales, much of our focus is often directed toward new customer acquisition with prospecting and moving qualified opportunities through the sales process—and, for the most part, it should be. After all, how can you grow your businesses if you aren’t perpetually attracting and closing new customers?
Sometimes, however, sales organizations put so much emphasis on new customers and that they neglect another excellent source of revenue growth: existing customers. Those accounts have already shown interest in your offerings, and they often present significant revenue growth opportunities—if you give them the attention they deserve.
Quite frankly, customers you’ve worked with for the last year or more very often are ripe for upsell or cross-sell. They know and trust you, they’ve experienced the value your products and services can provide, and their needs and pains are likely to evolve over time as their businesses evolve. What’s more, scheduling appointments with those customers often is easier than doing so with new prospects, and they’re generally more open to your recommendations.
Yet, most VARs don’t encourage their salespeople to engage these accounts on a regular basis. Instead, they assign that task to technicians.
While that’s a great strategy for monitoring customer satisfaction issues and identifying smaller opportunities, typically it’s not enough to uncover your customers’ more strategic needs—the kinds of issues or pains that represent serious revenue growth opportunities.
Your technicians are busy people with different priorities. Their goal is to keep your customers’ technology running smoothly. And that should be their focus. They listen for new opportunities as they work with customers, but they aren’t necessarily seeking the strategic, new, big opportunities.
So, what is the right strategy for monitoring existing customers? Here are three tips that I’ve advised to several VAR customers:
- Classify existing customers as top, middle and bottom accounts. Consider how you define each tier for your company. Some VARs examine revenue spend. Others consider a customer’s perception of the VAR’s total service offerings, where top customers highly value those offerings and bottom customers see little value.
- Set a strategy for how to work with each account level. How will you work with top accounts in a manner that is different than middle and bottom accounts? For example, will sales reps conduct monthly check-in meetings with your top accounts, but only quarterly review meetings for your middle accounts?
- Use multiple strategies to stay connected. You probably don’t have exhaustive sales resources so spreading your customer touchpoints over multiple channels and mediums is critical. Consider all the ways you have to stay connected to your customers in addition to salespeople, including technicians, marketing, lead generation and even vendors.
Ultimately, you’re creating a more systematic strategy for engaging with current customers. Through more targeted and frequent engagement, you’ll better understand your customers’ evolving needs and more frequently uncover new (and bigger) opportunities within those accounts. In the end, that can go a long way toward helping your sales organization exceed even your loftiest revenue growth objectives.
Kendra Lee is a top IT seller, prospect attraction expert, author of the award winning books “The Sales Magnet” and “Selling Against the Goal” and president of KLA Group. Specializing in the IT industry, KLA Group works with companies to break in and exceed revenue objectives in the Small and Midmarket Business (SMB) segment.
