Are Your Customers Jumping Ship?

Forget about finding new customers in the down economy; let’s make sure we are keeping the ones we have now! How are you and your team doing in this first line of defense?

I recently interviewed a VP Sales for a multi-billion dollar communications company who gave me some great ideas to pass along to other sales leaders. This VP had a basic business problem to solve for his company: CUSTOMER RETENTION NUMBERS WERE DOWN causing line losses to creep into the negative column.

Step One: Go into the Battlefield and Listen to the Soldiers. His first task was to devote his time to over 100 interviews with his sales managers, sales people and customers with the problem statement: WHY ARE WE LOSING CUSTOMERS? What he found was that

a.) They had too many customers to be able to service all of them and that

b.) Customers were spending so much time complaining about the current issues that these reps were spending a lot of time working but not much time selling.

Step Two: Get Resources to Fill the Gaps. He procured a team of customer service/inside sales reps to focus on “problem resolution” so that the sales people could focus on selling. This team was dedicated to the reps to provide accountability, visibility, responsibility and ownership for any issues the customer had with the current products and services the company was providing. Their goal was to exceed customer expectations and lay the ground work for future conversations.

Step Three: Add Discipline to the Sales Process: 2 Call Selling. Armed with these new resources, this VP created and implemented a “2 Call Selling” approach based on the input from his field. They would now approach customers by first listening and solving their issues and secondly by finding out what other needs they had to uncover a sales opportunity and close new business. In the first visit with the customer, they were not allowed to sell anything – they had to listen to problems and use the new team to get those problems solved. When that was accomplished only then could they go back in and have a conversation about the company’s new products and services.

Results. A large percentage of this sales team executed the program resulting in 56% fewer customer losses as well as an up-selling number of over $75,000/month into these accounts.

Article Written By Mimi Evans, CEO, SalesQuest