Customer retention: it’s not always about a discount

It’s a well known fact that retaining an existing customer is infinitely less expensive than finding and confirming a new customer. Hubspot will tell you that as little as a 5% increase in customer retention can improve company revenue by 25%-95%. So how do we get there? Do we need to create an ever-evolving three ring circus of customer surprises and delights… a little bit, let’s be honest, who doesn’t love a bit of a surprise!?! But sometimes the answer is more simple than that.

I’ve created a short video to get you started. I’d love to know your thoughts and experiences on the strategies you’ve used to retain customers in the past.

Facing a bigger challenge? Let’s jump on a call

The difference between a feature and a benefit … and why you should care.

I was chatting to an Senior Technical Lead for an IT Consulting firm. He’s a customer facing, operations focused, introvert. He said “I’m not a sales person, I work with the technology”. To which I responded “Great! Do me a favour: take a look at your calendar from the last week and tally up how many hours you spent on the phone with either your clients or your team”. What we discovered is that the majority of his time was spent navigating conversations where the purpose was coming up with a solution that both parties could agree on. Regardless of your role - active hunting, reactive selling, customer service, operations, or delivery - discussions are an integral part of just about any professional role these days. So, let’s pose another question: How can we make our discussions more productive?

If you’re in a sales or customer service role here are a few more questions for you:

How do we avoid coming across as a double-gun slinging lizard of a sales person? How to we get our prospect to connect on a deep emotional level with our pitch? How do we sure-up our confidence to present in an efficient and effective way?

Here’s a short video to help you get started.

Looking for a chat about your specific challenge? Tee up a call to discuss it here

Happy Sellling :)

10 ways to drive great sales performance

How do you drive continuous sales performance?

I’ve been asked this question in a number of interviews and my answer is based on watching and learning both successful and struggling sales teams over the years. I’m positive that there are more nuggets of gold out there, but these would be my top ten ways to drive great sales, or my top ten reason why your team may not be performing at the level you’d like them to.

So here are my recommendations:

1) Clean up your CRM and get your team to use it as a time management tool. For a start, I have yet to meet someone who is a magic memory machine, so they should have notes somewhere. And if you have a manager who’s holding all that client information in their head or notebook, they can very easily walk out the door with it when they decide to go. It’s an enormous business continuity risk when customer facing teams are not held accountable for maintaining clean and plentiful account and contact notes. It also happens to be the best way for your teams to manage their time efficiently, and be ready for the next-step of the conversation with their client at the appropriate interval. If you happen to have a sales person who “doesn’t believe in using the CRM”, refer to point number 10.

2) I realise the placement of this may seem a bit contrary to point number 1, but focus on more than just your activity reports. Yes, use the reports to confirm your understanding of volume, conversion, and the use of the tool. But on a day-to-day or week-by-week basis there are far more supportive-coaching approaches to discussing activity with your teams. At the end of the day, they could be nailing 20 appointments per week, but if their conversion is terrible you’ll need to dive deeper at some point. I used to have a 5 minute daily huddle with one of my teams where we would hit the high points and any needs they might have for the day. It was highly effective because we were all a bit competitive by nature. If one person had a fully booked day of calls there would be high-fives and congrats and a bit of a fire lit under the other colleagues. Mix it up and ask more questions about what’s to be accomplished during the calls instead of focusing just on the numbers.

3) Celebrate every little milestone with your team. Especially if you’re working with a very pro-active or new team, remember that getting a pipeline going is long and sometimes tedious work. Celebrate a fully clean record of accounts. Celebrate identifying a new prospect. Celebrate full qualification of a client even if that client turned out to NOT be a good fit for your business. They know you, you know them, and you can put that one down for 4-6 months. Of courses when there is conversion ring all the bells, throw high-five’s around and break out the bubbles. But most importantly, celebrate connection- it’s the first step towards conversion and if you want your team to spend time on it they will need to feel some appreciation for the effort.

4) Get your team to pick up the phone and call someone. Social selling is great, having a presence on social media, sharing content and posting, liking and commenting…. all good activities. But at some point you are going to need to ask for an appointment a demo or a commitment. Pick up the phone and get to know them.

5) Create clear territories and make sure there is balanced opportunity for success amongst your team. I used to run an annual planning day where we would evaluate each of the geographic and vertical markets. We would establish weighting criteria across size of organisation, industry (and their likelihood to buy from us), growth in the last year, conversion ratio for the account and the industry or territory etc. Then we would level-set the territories for the year ahead. We were all held accountable for the same activity levels so there was a lot of trust going into the process, but this was a great way to put a halt to any of those dangerous tit-for-tat sales squabbles that can sometimes breakout. Creating a feeling of equity and equality in a team is important.

6) Make sure your team understands how the business works, how the business makes money, and how they feed into the greater goal of the team and organisation. If you want your team to book profitable, well-suited business partnerships, you’re going to need to provide transparency as to how the business works and what levers they can pull to negotiate on your behalf. In some organisations high-volume/low profit is a solid strategy for winning more business. In some companies it just means your service team is running off their feet or scrimping on the service. Make sure your teams understand how it works all the way through to the bottom line- or at the very least to the break-even point

7) Create pricing that is easy to understand. If you can’t explain it to your sales person clearly on their first day on the job how is your client EVER going to see the value in it.

8) Know your unique (and I mean truly unique) value proposition and be able to identify your optimal client profile by psychographic or demographic criteria. Your customers must be able to see exactly what’s in it for them, and why your organisation is one of the only places they can get it. And your sales people need to know what kind of client they are out there hunting for.

9) Always be curious, always be growing. Test new markets, test new ideas, test new ways to yield your business. Workshop with your performing team members to come up with ideas they believe will delight their clients, show them how to build a profitable test environment and give it a red hot go. If you’re standing still you are really just moving backwards.

10) Thank your lone-wolf for their service and send them in the direction of their next adventure. Sales teams thrive on collaboration, knowledge-sharing, healthy competition, celebration and team work. My most productive teams were catalysts for each other, pinging ideas, and creative approaches, sharing sample communications, client or competitor intelligence, creating events or content that would be of interest to their market, and most importantly they were supportive in providing introductions and contacts when they had them. Let’s get rid of that stodgy, old, selfish, dominator model and exchange it for a work environment that feels equitable, creative, and productive.

Interested in a free discussion about how we might help you forge a path towards continuous sales performance? Click Here

What does that blue ocean look like now?

I’ve worked in sales of one form or another for, well… a while. I’ve seen multiple recessions. I’ve worked on two continents and supported sales people in markets around the globe. And it’s no secret that for many sales people, they’ve found themselves either burnt out and exhausted, or wondering what the heck they’re supposed to do now.

So where does that land us today? We’re nearly at Christmas. In the world of hospitality or travel this is a time of year when we should all be sweating over cocktails and giggles at some fashionable barge by the river. Where I live in Melbourne, Australia the whole country is about to shut down for a well-deserved two month holiday where will will (carefully) reconnect with friends and loved ones who we’ve been missing for most of the year while we’ve been locked down for health and safety.

I’ve had a number of conversations with friends and former colleagues about goal-setting and KPI’s. “This year is a wash, and who knows what’s coming next year…” and so on. At the end of the day, as sales people and business development leaders we know that we need to generate business, but we’re a bit stuck on how to create realistic targets, and even some of the best sales people I know are still a bit hesitant to start talking to clients again.

As we go hurling towards the new year maybe consider that perhaps 2021 is the year we redefine our typical KPI’s. I’m not suggesting we scrap pro-active selling - no no no no no. But I am suggesting that we take the pressure of yield or conversion off our sales people and allow them the flexibility to have meaningful, careful and human connections with their prospects and clients. Set some targets that focus on cleaning up and sharpening your databases - if your CRM was garbage before, I bet it’s an absolute dumpster fire now. Perhaps you consider tapping into your team talent to create and share original content. Find a way to refresh, reconnect, and share. And if you absolutely must create a KPI around connection and activity - be realistic, be fair, and be human. If you put pressure on your sales people to go out, bashing a challenger mindset and forcing some level of commitment from their clients, I’m going to suggest that you’re more likely to damage your organisation’s reputation and that of your sales people.

This is the year to be human and to show up and be supportive and understanding for your clients as humans as well as potential prospects. It’s Melbourne… maybe start with a friendly coffee.

Five ways to find more clients

I’ve walked into any number of organisations whereby the existing team says something along the lines of “We’re very well regarded in the industry, and we work with all the major corporations in this market. I’m sure you won’t find any new opportunities”. My Dad once told my brother that I could “find myself in a room full of horseshit and I’d spend two hours looking for the pony”. I am one of those incessant, growth-mindset, optimists who really does think there is a silver lining or at the very least a decent opportunity in any pile of shit.

But it is an interesting question - how do you walk into an established organisation and an established sales team and still manage to uncover new opportunities? Or, if you ARE one of those established sales people, how do you continue to show value to your organisation by finding more clients?

I’m sure I’m aging myself with this reference, but do you remember that scene in Working Girl? Not the one where she’s commuting on the Staten Island Ferry in a power suit, slouch socks and Reeboks…. no, the scene where she’s reading the newspaper and puts two and two together that there was a business opportunity. Take a leaf out of Melanie’s book - and do some research…. carefully.

I was working for a time at a small start up where I had the freshiest of fresh sales teams who all worked REALLY well together. We would sit together every morning and compare notes on how we found new prospects to connect with. We had split the team by vertical markets which, I will say does make this exercise a bit easier to accomplish - but one of the activities knocked out early in the piece was we pulled a list of every company they had worked with. Then company by company we looked up their competitors to see if we had worked with them. If the answer was “no”, they were added to the prospect list. I ran the same activity for myself when I joined a well-established Travel Management Company and it lead us to a $20M multi-national prospect who wasn’t even recorded in their CRM.

So here are my five tips:

1) Assume there MUST be opportunities you haven’t uncovered yet

2) Clean up your CRM, and ensure you’re contacts are correct

3) Evaluate your existing clients list, the size of the organisation, the industry, their location etc - and check to see if you’re working with their closest competitors

4) Use “Emerging” company lists that are published by ASX etc to identify new prospects

5) That old annoying 80/20 rule… even when you’re really busy with existing prospects, carve out time to make calls to new prospects. Keep adding to the funnel

Using love languages for business

Wait, what? Using the word “love” in a business setting. Yep. That’s right. We know that our customers are more likely to buy from people they like. We know that when we hit a hiccup or a really challenging negotiation that the best way to create a win-win or collaborative negotiation is to listen and empathise with our client. This holds true for our manager-associate relationships as well. We need to find a way to relate to people… so why not boil this down to the most visceral of responses? Enter: Love Languages for business. Some people like to use the phrase “Language of Appreciation”, but at the end of the day…. it all comes down to love.

This is not a new concept, so much so that you can find somewhere in the range of 100 different tests to establish your love language like this one. You can also find some really helpful resources for what to do with that information… applying it to your relationship with a friend, a partner or your child.

Once you’re able to identify your love language and that of someone close to you, it becomes easier to start to understand how to best relate to your colleagues and clients. Or, if you’re a bit self-reflective, you can look back at an interpersonal interaction that went terribly wrong and it will usually boil down to an overlooked or accidentally declined act of love. If you’re sitting there thinking I’m crazy, I’m going to give you an example:

Think about the last work meeting you attended. I’m going to guess there were a few people who were early or at least very one time, and then at least one person who was late. If one of your primary love languages is time, I’m willing to bet you were on time, and it drove you absolutely CRAZY that your colleague was late. So much so, that I bet you can also recall the last three times someone was late to that meeting. If you’re reading this thinking “I don’t understand what the big deal is”, I’m going out on a limb to say that time does NOT fall into your top two love languages and you may even be the person overlooking how important it is to your colleagues that you show up on time.

This is such a simple idea, and such an effective way to connect better with friends, family and colleagues that I highly recommend this to just about anyone who will listen. It’s helped me to hone in on where I made some mistakes early on in my career and it very rarely fails me on connecting with people today.

As a wrap up I’d say, don’t overlook importance of accepting a business-appropriate act of love, or the importance of honouring the human preferences of our colleagues and clients. The grid above should be good to get you started.