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The Importance of Your Existing Customers

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cold calling techniques

I’d like to use this blog to take a few minutes and go over the importance of keeping in contact with your existing customers. As a sales trainer, if I had a pound each time I had a business owner, sales manager or even sales professional say the following quotation to me I would probably be able to retire on a private tropical island somewhere sipping at cocktails all day. So what is this quotation that I here so frequent? We are constantly touting for new business, prospecting via the telephone and other lead generation techniques, however, we are still failing to reach our targets, what can we do to overcome this? I always like to answer this question with another question; what do you do with your existing customers, have you got the most you can out of them? Silence usually follows this question. You see the norm in pretty much every business I’ve helped out seems to be, well they’re a client now, when they want something they’ll come back to us. Will they, really, are you sure about that? What I mean is why shouldn’t we take a portion out of our day that we are spent prospecting, probably cold calling and make some calls to our existing customers. I like to follow this up with an inspiring story from a book I read called The Ultimate Sales Machine by Chet Holmes, if you enjoy reading this type of literature, this book is a must read. Chet goes onto explain how he was consulting a carpet cleaning company that had worked extremely hard on new business and gained 30’000 clients. These clients on average had their carpets cleaned once every three years, so they were making around 10’000 sales per year. When the consultant first got to work with the company the perception was people will have their carpets cleaned when they are dirty and need to be cleaned. However, The consultant had come accross some government data to say that carpets act like a giant filter, capturing dust, dirt, pollen, dust mites and their waste etc. He’d also found a study suggesting that when carpets are removed from a building people get sick four times more often. However, like any normal filter carpets become saturated, creating the need for professional cleaning as not even daily vacuuming gets rid of the embedded bacteria. So working with the CEO of the company, they came up with  something called the gold service that they would trial on their existing customers, using the market data they had found as a hook and sell it on the basis of the customer having their carpets cleaned twice per year. They worked out a script and gave it to the top performing sales person to trial. Chet left that night feeling as though he had really delivered for the company. He returned a week later to see how the sales person had got on; and this is how it went;

  • Chet: So how did it go?
  • Sales Person: It didn’t work
  • Chet: It didn’t work?
  • Sales Person: No. It didn’t work.
  • Chet: Well how many people did you offer it to?
  • Sales Person: I offered it to ten people
  • Chet: And nobody brought it?
  • Sales Person: No two people brought it.

You see to the sales person eight out of ten no’s on a new service should be deemed a failure, but let’s crunch the numbers. Two people out of the ten brought the gold service; the company had 30’000 clients buying once every three years, that’s about 10’000 sales per year. Now imagine an extra 6000 (a mere 20%) buying twice per year. What does this mean for the business; it’s an enormous increase in turnover. Had it been left to the sales person the gold scheme would have been left on the shelf gathering dust. The moral of the story here folks is don’t forget your existing clients. Do a SWOT analysis and see if you can come up with a new product or service that would see them buying from you more frequently. Or, just do a simple database cleanse. Ring all of your clients, inform them you are doing a database cleanse and that you want to make sure that you still have the correct details for them, go through their details and while you’ve got them on the phone ask them if there is anything you can do to assist them at the moment. You would be surprised the amount of people that would say “well actually, since you ask, yes”.

Happy Selling



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