I’ve spent the last ten years coaching business owners and sales leaders on the proper design of their sales model. While I generally focus on new business and how to drive net new revenue growth, in this article I want to discuss something different: best practices to protect and growing your base. How do you expand the relationships and increase your value to your clients? Here are some things to consider when building a strategy for account management.
Engage With Your Clients Continually
Let’s face it—in our industry many sales organizations only approach the customer for contract renewal. Once the sale is made, the two companies return to their corners and their day-to-day operations and don’t often interact with one another. Many people talk about their quarterly business reviews (QBR) with their clients, but from what I understand these reviews often only involve front-line contacts, and not decision makers. I suggest to dealer principals and sales managers alike that they must develop a QBR process ensuring appropriate engagement with their customer’s senior management. They must not neglect to push that issue.
I consider this process to be as much about sales as account management. After the initial agreement is signed, your sales team must continue to engage the most valued clients and sell them on remaining a client. Once you define a process to do this, audit it periodically to ensure that it is delivering the highest renewal rates possible.
It’s also important to conduct a strategic QBR when engaging their C-suite and a tactical QBR when engaging middle management or lower. In other words, provide information that will align with the level of contact you’re dealing with.
For instance, I have seen sales reps sit down with a C-level and talk about individual devices, the number of service calls they had last month, and response times down to the minute. And on the flip side, I’ve seen sales reps discuss their “30,000-foot strategy” with an office manager who has no idea what they’re talking about.
Every detail is important to someone, just make sure that you’re giving the right information to the right person in your QBR. Remember, the goal of the QBR is to keep that client for the long term. I don’t think it’s necessary to have senior management in every QBR, but if they are involved, make sure you’re discussing pertinent information that they’ll want to hear.
Dos and Don’ts
- Don’t schedule your meetings around the service problems that you’ve handled over the last month.
- Do bring in new technology sales opportunities when you can get the decision maker in the room. Remember to share this information as a trusted advisor. You want to make it clear that you’re trying to help their business succeed and not just satisfying your quota.
Proper Protocol and Approach
About once per quarter, I get a call from a dealer who is losing one of their larger clients and wants me to help. They’ll ask, “What can we do?” and I usually answer with this question: “What have you done?”
Some dealer principals believe it’s the sales rep’s responsibility to maintain the relationship with the client. I believe it’s an all-hands-on-deck job to keep a client. It’s everyone’s responsibility, from the dealer on down. If that client is medium to high in value, then the dealer should have a process that gets them personally engaged with the client’s senior management. You might not become golfing buddies, but you should be involved in the retention strategy for EVERY medium to large client.
I see dealers who get to a certain size and begin to throw the responsibility for client retention at their sales organization. WRONG! Of course, the sales organization plays a big part, but the dealer also plays a very important role. Make sure you get to know their senior management by name and engage them throughout the year for strategic partnership goal setting. Grow your relationship with them and make sure you have engagements (like lunch) where no business is discussed at all.
Everyone in your company should understand the importance of client retention and your company’s goals. Across many dealer relationships I currently track an 89 percent portfolio retention result and I believe that is too low. Set your renewal goal for 95 percent or above and make sure you help each person in your company know how to contribute to that goal. Create a reward program and drive it every day of the business year. Have open discussions with all employees about winning and losing clients and take in suggestions and recommendations on how to keep your retention rate at 95 percent or above.
A company in Dallas, Sewell Cadillac, has a commercial where their customers say they’ll NEVER buy a car from any other dealer. They don’t talk about the company’s sales rep, they don’t talk about the make, model or features of Sewell cars—they talk about how they feel and the relationship that Sewell has with them. Imagine creating that type of relationship with your clients!
Relationship building is a GIVE, GIVE, GIVE process from your side. We’ve all met someone who has the gift for creating GREAT relationships. Think about it—when someone is looking out for your success, it creates absolute loyalty and a moneymaking culture.
The last time you dealt with an unruly client, how did you resolve that situation? I once had a client whose business model was stronger on the weekend than weekdays. They had so many untrained weekend warriors they destroyed the copier every week. Every Monday, we’d get the call—“this piece of junk is a lemon!” usually with an enormous amount of slanderous name-calling. I’m sure everyone has faced a client or two like this.
So how do you handle those situations? I went to the owner and told them that I was going to solve this problem. As politely as I could, I explained about the untrained users. But more importantly, I placed two more devices (from my zero cost trade-ins) in their facility and said I would dispatch a service tech automatically every Monday to assure that the 3 devices were ready to go for their next session.
Was doing this profitable? Probably not. But later I found out that the owner was a board member of several large organizations throughout the community and continually recommended us everywhere. He told everyone on his board, “we’re not shopping for print devices, the relationship I have with our current vendor is unbeatable, regardless of price!” He’d tell them, “No matter what goes wrong, they’ll solve the issue, guaranteed!” A good relationship, that’s what people want to buy!
Finally, each of your employees must be empowered and approved to execute these types of relationships with your clients. They should be jumping at the chance to solve issues like that and there can’t be a bottleneck where someone has to ask someone, who has to ask you, to get permission. Your company culture must be tuned to drive a premier customer relationship. Zig Ziglar once said; “When you focus on problems you get more problems, when you focus on possibilities, you have more opportunities!”
Is it possible to raise that 89 percent retention result to 95 percent or better? Absolutely! Your client retention result must consider all types of clients, the good, the bad, and the ugly. If you could win just a few more from each category, 95 percent isn’t that hard to reach at all. Remember it starts at the top with you! Most likely analyzing the relationship you have with your employees would give you some insight as to the relationship you create with your customers. You might be surprised!
