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It Doesn’t End With the Sale: Managing Customer Relationships0

The Pipeline Guest Post – Megan Totka

Customers are the lifeblood of any business, and attracting new customers while strengthening your relationships with existing ones is a constant challenge. The best way to do so, however, is a matter that often leaves your sales and marketing staff at odds. Your sales force is focused primarily on closing the deal and landing new customers, while your marketing department wants to nurture customer relationships before and after the sale. No matter what your role at your company, however, it’s to your benefit to continue to nurture customer relationships long after they’ve paid their invoices.

Why Long-Term Customer Relationships Matter

We’ve all heard the adage that it’s cheaper to retain a customer than it is to acquire a new one. After all, you’ve already done the wooing. They already love your brand. If you maintain the relationship, they’ll come back to buy other products or services from you, increasing their customer lifetime value.

A customer with whom you already have a relationship is more likely to refer more business to you. They’re happy to tell others about how much they enjoy your brand when communicating through social media, review sites like Yelp, and face to face with friends. A single customer can help attract business from friends and family if they’re happy. And the best way to keep your customers happy is by paying attention to their needs and staying connected.

Managing Your Customer Relationships

Customer relationship management tools like Insightly and Salesforce make it easy to create profiles for each of your customers. You can track critical data like purchases, each customer’s birthday, and communication preferences. Companies use this data to better engage with customers. If you have your customer’s birthday, you can send her a email with a special birthday offer. If you know she has looked repeatedly at a certain item on your website, you can offer her a discount for it. Building a profile is a great first step; if you are in regular contact with a client, take notes each time you speak with them.

Social media is another fantastic tool for staying on top of customer relationships. Since Hootsuite lets you set up custom streams based on your preferences, it’s a snap to set up a stream containing the social media content generated by all your customers. From there, it’s up to you how far you drill down. You could create streams for different types of customers, such as those buying women’s clothes in one stream, children’s clothing in another, and men’s clothes in the last stream. You could set up a search for a keyword that relates to your industry to see who’s talking about it, and connect with them. The possibilities are endless, but what matters is using the info you gather to enhance your customer relationships.

Once you’ve set up customer profiles, it’s simply a matter of paying careful attention to what’s being said, especially if it relates to your product or brand. If a customer’s unhappy with your company, they might not bother to tell you, but reach out on their social network instead. If you’re monitoring your customer Tweets using your new setup, it’s much easier to discover customer concerns—and address them—before the situation escalates.

From a more positive angle, if you notice a customer tweeting about her search for product or service you provide (that they may not realize you offer), your sales team has a fantastic opportunity to respond and develop that interest into a lead.

Email is another great way to stay on connected to your customer. Don’t bombard your customers with emails, but do make your emails frequent and relevant enough to remind them of why they chose to give you their business. Sending one newsletter and one promotional email at specific times each week or month is a good start, but with a little creativity and careful data management, you can create targeted email campaigns for special occasions or broken out by demographic. Using the data gleaned through your customer relationship management software, you can deliver even more sophisticated and targeted messages, such as discounts for a customer’s birthday for example. The better targeted the offers, the better your connection with your customers.

The aim is to keep growing the connection. With intelligent application of the information you gather, you can build real and lasting relationships with your customers that won’t end with the sale.

About Megan Totka

Megan Totka is the Chief Editor for ChamberofCommerce.com. She specializes on the topic of small business tips and resources. ChamberofCommerce.com helps small businesses grow their business on the web and facilitates connectivity between local businesses and more than 7,000 Chambers of Commerce worldwide.

What’s Improving – Your Sales OR Orders?2

By Tibor Shanto – tibor.shanto@sellbetter.ca

As the economy continues to show hints of progress, and business picks up, it is important to understand the nature of the improvements in sales you and your company experience. Taking into account the old adage “all boats rise with the tide”, you need to be able to discern where your growth is coming from. Is it from increased sales, or just an increase in orders due to an improving economic environment; and yes Sunshine, there is a difference, much like the difference between sales professionals and order takers.

More than ever, having a defined sales process, with supporting metrics is a must. Without that, you may easily mistake increased revenues with improved sales or selling, when in reality the improvement may be organic. Increased demand, leading to an uptick in orders or improved selling, the two are very different, but often mistaken.

In fact, this is one of the risks of relying strictly on a single lagging indicator – Revenues, rather than a mix of leading and lagging indicators. In many ways you can look at it the way investors look at interest rates paid on fixed income instruments, where they back out the rate of inflation from the total rate they receive from an instrument to arrive at the real rate. Think of the organic increase in orders as inflation, and the real rate as YOUR ability to sell more or better in a given market. All sellers benefit from a rise in demand, only those who focus on selling will grow sales beyond the herd, and get more than their share of growth. Increased market share is always a good thing.

To avoid being caught, you need understand your intra-sale conversion rates, understanding if in fact you are doing a better job of converting leads to prospects, prospects to proposals and proposals to wins. By measuring these and other critical points you will know if you are just benefiting from an increase in demand – more leads, or ability to convert those leads. If you have a 4:1 lead to prospect rate, then it goes without saying that you’ll have more sales from six leads than 4, 1.5 sales vs. 1. But if your sales and selling skills improve, and you can move to a 3:1 ratio, you’ll sell proportionally more. This is important in down markets too, but people get fooled in up markets when the wind is in their sails.

Once you understand these measures, you can set goals for theses (or other) conversions from stage to stage, and benefit from the compounding effect, and increase both real and organic sales. With goals and metrics in place, it is much easier to develop and Execute a tactical plan, you will be in a position to adjust or change your model to ensure continuous growth and skills improvements.

Not knowing can create more than false comfort, it could lead you to make wrong decisions, and by the time you realize, you may be left too far behind the competition.

What’s In Your Pipeline?
Tibor Shanto

One of the greatest things invented by the financial service industry was “Compound Interest“. Save for the fact that no one is paying much interest on money these days, the reality of Compound Interest still holds and delivers added gain regardless of how low of high rates are. I was watching a teacher explain the concept to a grade 5 class, and he brought it down to “a little to start, a little from here, a little from there, and over time you end up with more than straight interest”.

As you assess your plan for sales success in 2013, you can take advantage of “Compounding” to achieve greater success. Rather than resolving to do new things in new ways in 2013, why not resolve to improve a little here and a little there with things you already do or need to do; but do it in a way that ends up being greater than the individual gains on your efforts.

Read On…

What’s in Your Pipeline?
Tibor Shanto

The great thing about sales is that every day is different, bringing new challenges, or familiar challenges with new wrinkles, testing your skills and agility. This constant change directly impacts both sales people, their sales organization, and by extension their sales process. Some organizations dodge this by not having a process, allowing their sales people to rely on their “creativity” or god given skills to deliver the numbers. One of the risks with this approach is not knowing the quality of their execution efforts until after the numbers are in; in other words, after the fact, and after they can do anything to change the outcome. Given the stats on the level of success of many sales organizations and individuals, it is clear that having a defined and standardized sales process is crucial to success even for companies selling the most basic products.

Read On…

What’s in Your Pipeline?
Tibor Shanto

By the time you know if you had made your quarter or year, it is too late. If you made it great, if you didn’t, too bad, it’s too late to do anything about it. So to succeed in sales, forget the revenue, it is a lagging indicator, focus on what really matters, the activities and elements that lead to a sale, the leading indicators.

What’s in Your Pipeline?
Tibor Shanto

Hanging Out with @GlobeSmallBiz: How to develop a Winning Sales strategy

Last week I had the opportunity to participate in The Globe and Mail’s Report on Business’ Small Business interview series on Google+ Hangout. As the title suggests, we discussed a number of topics relating to sales, and sales challenges important for small business owners.

This was not only a great use of the technology, but we covered a number of key issues potential pitfalls, and opportunities for small business owners.

Take a look, comment, enjoy, and profit.

httpvh://youtu.be/A3FEyN2B4dE

What’s in Your Pipeline?
Tibor Shanto

Hang on, before you get your pipeline in a knot, read on and discover. We’re talking about client profiling, not racial profiling. The reality is that all the things (some) people do not like about the type of profiling that takes place at airports, or in upscale shops at suburban malls, do indeed help sellers identify not just buyers, but the right buyers, and as a results buyers who buy faster. After all, if you could recognize the attributes of a buyer, and recognize them sooner, that would be good. The only thing better, is recognizing the attributes of a non-buyer so you can save time and resources.

Now unlike the other profiling, you probably can’t afford the type of heavy technology, algorithms and other applications used by some, but then again you don’t need to. What you do need is the discipline to invest the time to develop a simple profiling process, and the discipline to actually put it into practice.

This goes beyond the simple concept of analyzing your wins so you can hone your perception, and hope only engage with winners. Too much of a good thing can come back to bite, and without a balance discipline, selective perception can devolve into restricted perception, leaving good opportunities unpursued. Given the fact that most B2B sellers have less than a 50% close ratio, more like a 25% closing average, it is foolish to ignore your losses. By understanding why you both win and lose, you can sharpen your success filters, change things that are causing you to lose, and disqualify non-buyers sooner; some would call that a win – win – win.

Profiling can be done in a number of ways, all looking to gain insight based on different factors. There are those who try to do it based on personality traits, DISC would be an example. Although if you buy in to the notion that people buy from people they like, does this lead to people selling to people they like, and if so, how do I know if I’m going to like them before I pick up the phone? Ah, now I get why so many people have call reluctance, they don’t know if they’re going to like the prospect they are about to call. I digress.

I prefer doing it on a deal basis, this helps me categorize based on buyers objectives, most professionals and people running a business will tend to have objectives, and approached the right way, are interested in things that help them achieve objectives, or avoid things that may hamper their progress, and will act to remove those barriers. A lack of clear objectives is a sure clue to a less than committed buyer, a longer sales cycle if it happens at all, or usually not a good use of time.

As with most things in sales, it is less about the tools and more about the mindset and the discipline to do it, and do it consistently. So go ahead, profile, your buyers don’t care as long as it helps them in the end.

What’s in Your Pipeline?
Tibor Shanto

Don’t forget to Join us in Houston, October 18 for the Proactive Prospecting Workshop!

We have all heard the expression “Lower Hanging Fruit”, implication being the fruit is ripe, heavy to the point where it is pulling down the branch, ready to be picked and enjoyed. In sales it is often thought of as prospects who are perceived “ready to buy” or easy to sell due to a number of factors. “Lower Hanging Fruit” is great if you are a new rep to the company or territory, but in most instances sales professionals need to close more than ” Lower Hanging Fruit ” to meet or exceed quota.

What should make most sales people uncomfortable about strictly relying on “lower hanging fruit”, is the implication that it is easy to grab, there for the taking, and in essence making the rep in question more an order taker than a card carrying member of the sales profession.

This is a real problem in today’s environment, at a time when the economy and companies would benefit much more from having some real sellers on board, rather than order takers; unfortunately the latter group seems to be more prominent, and growing.

Read On…

What’s in Your Pipeline?
Tibor Shanto

In previous posts I shared how time and your treatment of it have a direct impact on your selling results and success. How allocating time is a much more productive than efforts invested in trying to manage it; shifting time to help you and your buyer do more with a finite and non-renewable resource.

Since time is constant, and always a key part of the success equation, there are other ways for sellers to leverage time for success. One is the use of deadlines and critical milestones. A specific point in time creates focus all around. Once firmed up it can help the buyer prioritize their actions, resources and decisions in order to deliver by the given date. One of the most important components of an effective and successful Discovery stage and process, is understanding and confirming the buyer’s decision/process. Core to this, is the buyer’s timelines and most importantly, deadlines. Remember, gaining efficiencies and advantages by shifting time, is one of the key drivers for people making purchase decisions. To add impact, drive to establish and confirm not only when they need to make decision by, but when they expect the benefit of the purchase to materialize.

The purchase is an incidental piece of a bigger thing unfolding. Whatever you’re selling, the important time for the buyer is when they will get material benefit from using what you are selling, not the actual purchase of your offering. If putting your machine on the floor will:

Reduce errors in production by 5%
Which in turn means lower cost of production
Which leads to improved margins (don’t forget sometimes improved margins may be a direct objective for the director you are dealing with, which leads to a direct financial bonus for the buyer)
And the buying organization has set a margin target for end of next quarter

The end of the next quarter is a more prevailing a deadline than the slated purchase date. You can leverage both to create focus, having both “project” deadline and expected benefit deadline. Even when they may not have a formal buying/decision making process, having a timeline can be very powerful focal point; and most have a sense of time. Of course if they don’t it is a powerful clue that you may not be dealing with a serious prospect, even when they may have a decision process, but seems no need to make a decision now!

It is also important when you run into reluctance to change; having the deadline will help you accentuate the risk of inaction. This may not be that important to “be found” sellers, but for real sales people, it can help you calm a client by focusing on the upside of the projected benefit, and the risk associated with standing still; not easy, but if it was they wouldn’t need us. Having that point in time, helps you work backwards to where they are now, and create urgency and more importantly action – execution. Once you develop this skill, you’ll be able to work backwards in very effective way, most specifically in “if you don’t act by this date, you will miss”.

And let’s not forget the importance of deadlines you create efficiencies in the way you sell and manage your pipeline. Deadlines help you prioritize execution. They also help you time sales out, if your average sales cycle is 6 weeks, you can set a deadline for expected close, and measure you execution against that, and if need be disqualify opportunities that are beyond deadline.

What’s in Your Pipeline?
Tibor Shanto

On Thursday October 18, The Proactive Prospecting Workshop is coming to Houston, specifically to Four Points by Sheraton Houston Southwest, at 2828 Southwest Freeway, Houston.

If you are in B2B sales, and need to engage with more new prospects, mark this date on your calendar, then sign up for this full day interactive prospecting program.

Whether you are with a small company or large, veteran or just launching your career, this workshop will give you the fundamentals needed to connect and engage with more qualified buyers.

We leave dogma at the door, this is not about old school vs. new school, this is about executing a proven methodology for prospecting more effectively and filling your pipeline with the quality prospects in the right quantities. This is the same program that has helps thousands of sale professionals improve their skills and increase prospects and sales. Sales professional in dozens of companies are using the methods and process delivered in the Proactive Prospecting Workshop to deliver consistent results.

What you’ll learn…

Overcome the fear of cold calling
Develop techniques for making successful cold calls
Take a proactive role in filling your sales pipeline
Write effective e-mails – Leave voice mail messages that get returned
Handle Objections – win more appointments

To learn more about the results sellers have realised just click here to read success studies, or watch what they said after attending the Proactive Prospecting Workshop.

Every New Customer begins as a Prospect!

Start filling your pipeline with Real Prospects!

Learn more at www.proactiveprospecting.com
Sign up today, seating is limited to 100 people!

Early Bird Specials Available – Multi-Attendee offers
ADDED BONUS – 500 FREE leads from LeadFerret.com
The Proactive Prospector’s Guide to Objection Handling Booklet

www.proactiveprospecting.com
Call – (855) 25-SALES

What’s in Your Pipeline?
Tibor Shanto

Sep 8th, 2012 Appointments, Attitude, Business Acumen, Buying Process, Change Management, Cold calling, Communication, Disqualify, EDGE Selling, execution, Impact Questions, Leadership, Metrics, Next Steps, Objection Handling, Persistence, Proactive Prospecting, Prospecting, qualifying, Referrlas, Sales Cycle, Sales Leadership, Sales Mistakes, Sales Process, Sales Strategy, Sales Success, Sales Training, Success, Time Management, Voice mail, Workshops