In my last blog, “It’s Not Me, It’s The Economy”: Customer Retention in 2010, I wrote about the risk of losing existing business due to the economic climate. This article will focus on Sales Enablement strategies proven to help retain and grow business, including what many clients call Quarterly Business Reviews or QBRs. We have worked with clients that execute on this extremely well, and internally we deploy some of the same methods here at SAVO.
Step 1: Segment your clients
The industry field in your CRM system provides value, but what other information do you have that will help prioritize your efforts? Some key questions you should ask are:
- Are your accounts stratified by amount of business generated?
- Do you look at client size to determine potential opportunity?
- How many contacts and relationships do we have in an account, and how high up are they?
- Do you monitor or overall client satisfaction in your CRM system?
- Do you have renewal dates fields and triggers to initiate action?
- Are some clients not worth the effort as they are already in serious financial distress?
- Do you know which clients have up sell opportunities, and if competitors are pitching to them?
Most companies rate leads and opportunities in CRM, however have failed to properly segment and rank customers. Also, some companies have made the mistake in just doing a basic segmentation, and immediately barraging that customer with whiz bang cross sell communications or super saver discount emails. Due to the economic climate every buyer is overwhelmed with these communications, and if we are not careful, this can alienate buyers more than build a relationship.
Kimberly Collins from Gartner was recently quoted in an interesting article on ZDnet, stating “Too many companies try to jumpstart revenue with CRM but cross-selling doesn’t work if you focus on it too soon.” She points out that “if customers aren’t happy they are less susceptible to cross-selling.”
Step 2: Deploy a Strategy
The next step is to leverage the segmentation to help decide a strategy aligned to specific client needs, and optimized based on internal resources. The goal is to solidify the relationship before a call takes place, similar to those at the beginning of my previous blog. First of all, who are the players who get involved internally? What are the triggers and cadence for meetings? What is our value proposition for cross selling stickier, higher margin solutions to offset discounting on existing business and ensure renewals in the future?
Essentially, many clients create a Playbook (view my Sales Playbook Blog) of how to interact with existing business. For example, one client I know saw a serious issue losing Financial Services clients in this economy, and created a strategic team of industry aligned sellers and experts to target this group. They put themselves in the shoes of their clients and actually looked at opportunity cost of leaving themselves, and created a value proposition and campaign to stay. Who, what, when, and how you interact with based on the segmentation of clients is key to ensuring effectiveness, avoiding duplication of efforts, and that you’re not blindsided with a loss in business.
Step 3: Access data around proof points and differentiation
There is a lot of information about your clients that you can leverage to justify and potentially grow your relationship. For many clients this exists outside of CRM, and could reside in a reporting tool, data warehouse, or ERP system. Data on previous purchases, projects, billable hours, savings, ROI, and many others can be the make-or-break point in retaining the relationship. For a shipping company it may be on time delivery, for a media company click through rate, and in a wealth management firm I just spoke with this week it was investment performance statistics on a portfolio. If possible, try to consolidate this data down to one location, so that it is accessible for the meetings and easily analyzed.
Even with all of this data, many times a seller is not ready to present a review with this client. Have a discovery call with your champion(s) understanding the client’s key initiatives in 2010, and additional data points internally calculated that are not in your systems. A best practice is to create supporting discovery guides, ROI calculators, letters, and value quantification tools for this.
Step 4: Automate the data with a targeted message
If you ask a seller, a business review is one of their most time consuming and painful experiences of the quarter, however an executive will say they are the most valuable and strategic moves a company can make. Our clients have done studies on the effect these meetings have on their revenue, and it leads them to the conclusion that they must do as many as possible, and with more than just their largest clients. The challenge is each of these can take days if not weeks to put together. Taking data and turning it into a presentable story with charts, graphs, cross sells, and definitive proof can be a herculean effort. Start by harvesting your best examples, and put together a blueprint for the perfect story to tell.
Clients in numerous industries work with us to automate the creation of this content using our proprietary Data Driven Asset (DDA) framework integrated with the Microsoft Application Programming Interface (API) for documents. Each client implements the configuration and customization of this content a bit differently; we’d be happy to share some examples with you.
