If you are a business owner, I’d bet you have ‘an increase in sales’ as one of your key organizational goals. Increasing sales is great, but sales all the sales don’t mean anything without a sound business development model that is essential for building a long term relationship with customers. The key difference between sales and business development is that while sales is a short term transactional approach, business development is a long term relationship based approach. Would you rather have a wave of 100 new customers and have 10 of them stick or steady manageable growth of 10 new clients a month?
There are several disadvantages of ignoring business development, even if you have a strong sales team. Your sales staff are hungry. They want to hit their mark and are heavily focused on closing a sales transaction. Have you ever heard of the ‘us vs. them’ mindset. Many sales groups suffer from this mentality and don’t care if a “bad” customer ends up hurting someone or some process down the line. It will also mean that for every sale, the amount of time and resources that you invest is disproportionately high. There is hope you lucky reader to make sure this doesn’t happen to your company! The first step in having a holistic approach towards business development is to have a cultural shift from a transactional approach to a long term approach. While all businesses exist to make profitable sales (they rock), it is important to realize that sustainable increase in sales shall occur only if you can demonstrate the value of your offering to your customers. Your product or service should be perceived by your customers as adding value and helping them. Unless a strong relationship based on trust is developed with your customers, you will not be able to mine your customers and generate loyalty. Sound complicated? It’s not really. Just keep reading for an easy 6 step breakdown.
Here is a list of things to do to have a robust business development program in your business.
1. Identify Key Accounts: Typically a key account program is put in place only if you have a B2B business model, which essentially means that you are directly selling to other businesses. However, a key account program can work effectively even in a B2C scenario, as most businesses have a large volume of their business coming from a small group of key clients. It is also important to note that while you identify key accounts, you need to also identify those customers who are currently small, but have the potential to be a large customer in future. You may even want to include potential customers who are not yet part of your business, but have the potential to be large accounts. One of the ways in which you can get this information is to identify the high value customers of your competitors.
2. Strategize Your Accounts: In order to develop a strategy for your key accounts, you need to research, research, then so more research! Take a good look at your key accounts to understand their business model and their needs so that you can tailor your products to suit their requirements. As part of your account management program, you must have a target against each of your key accounts, a plan on how to achieve it and also identify your personnel who will be responsible for each element in your plan. Some of the things that you can include in your plan are how often you would communicate with them, what are the ways in which you will engage with the customer, do you plan to offer special schemes for your key accounts and so on.
3. Build Relationships: Regardless of the sales efforts with your key accounts, you will also have to have a relationship building effort with your key accounts. These efforts would depend on the nature of your business, but some of the strategies that you can consider include frequent one to one meeting with your key accounts, sending them freebies such as product samples or white papers, organizing a closed group discussion or invitee-only webinar for your key accounts and so on. Oh, don’t forget about free food. Everyone loves a catered breakfast!
4. Aim for High Ticket Sales: Although a high ticket sale would typically involve a longer sales cycle and more resources, the additional effort is well worth it. Converting and closing high ticket opportunities requires an organized approach of identifying the opportunity, identifying the steps involved and actively tracking the progress made. Often, sales personnel who are focused on monthly numbers may not be the right team to focus on these opportunities as they often lose steam and drop the opportunity. It is therefore necessary to have a cross functional team comprising of senior management team members from planning, sales, finance, and business development to track these opportunities and win the deals.
5. Deliver Beyond What You Promise: When it comes to your key accounts, it is extremely important to not just deliver what you promise, but to exceed expectations and delight your customers. Outstanding customer service is an essential element of building great customer relationships and grow your business via referrals. There should be a mechanism to prioritize and resolve complaints from these customers in ‘fast track’ mode.
6. Take Feedback Seriously: Finally, it is important to take feedback from your key accounts seriously, so that you can improve your product offerings. There should be a well-defined process in place to review suggestions from your key accounts and take necessary actions. It is also important to obtain feedback from your own team who service these key accounts on how you can improve your services and products and act on the suggestions.
Do you have a key account program in your organization? Please join the conversation and let us know some of the things that you do as part of the program below!
You may also like:
The Sales Cabinet http://www.thinkaboutcrm.com/sales-cabinet
Trust is needed to sell http://www.thinkaboutcrm.com/trust-needed-sell
6 Great Example of Customer Service http://www.thinkaboutcrm.com/6-great-examples-customer-service
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