In today’s economy, I find that many business owners have shifted their concerns and sales effort from acquiring new customers to a bear-hug-like effort at retaining their current customers (which, by the way, is the wrong approach to sales development, but I’ll deal with that in an upcoming HotSheet). The trouble is that most of them look for complicated ways to retain customers when in fact the best way to do it is dirt-simple, and should be instinctive.
Think about this – how much money does your company invest in customer satisfaction surveys, mailings, customer appreciation days, loyalty reward programs, and the like? These, of course, can be helpful in different ways, but the all-time greatest way to gauge the quality of your customer relationships (and hence retain your customers) is much cheaper and simpler:
Try to sell them something else.
That’s it. Really. Try to sell them additional items, higher frequency of service, a higher quality of item, or anything else that could be considered an “upsell” or “development” sale.
How does this retain customers? Simple. You can’t sell someone something without talking to them, and the “secret” to retaining your customers is TALKING to them. When I say “talking” to them, I mean HAVING A QUALITY CONVERSATION. Most purely “retention” calls aren’t quality conversations. They go something like this:
Salesperson: “Hi, Mr. Customer. Great to see you. I just wanted to come by to let you know how much I appreciate your business. How’s everything going?”
Customer: “Fine, good.”
Salesperson: “Good, glad to hear that. Hey, did you see that football game Sunday?”
And there it goes. The salesperson, confident that he has assessed the customer’s satisfaction, reports to his boss that everything is great with the customer. And it goes on that way until the day that the customer leaves, catching everyone by surprise. Why did this happen? It happened because the salesperson stopped DIGGING, and PROBING, his customer. The salesperson became complacent, and maybe even a little fear-driven, to really dig into the relationship. The reason why is that salespeople don’t like to hear negativity, and digging can produce negativity.
However, there’s a way around this. Try this conversation on instead:
Salesperson: “Hi, Mr. Customer. Great to see you. I just wanted to come by to let you know how much I appreciate your business. How’s everything going?”
Customer: “Fine, good.”
Salesperson: “Good, glad to hear that. You know, I really do appreciate your fastener business, but I’d like to take a stab at helping you with your cutting tool needs, too. We carry a great line of cutting tools, and can supply them at he same level of service we’re already giving you. It’s the same truck, the same delivery person, and the same invoice; you save costs by having to deal with less vendors. Can we have that conversation?”
Customer: “Whoa, wait a minute. I do like working with you, but we have some issues with your delivery person. He’s not always on time, and he’s let us run out of items from time to time. It’s not often, but I’d really rather address this issue first.”
See the difference in the two calls? The second call included a pitch for additional items, but ended with an issue being raised by the buyer. The buyer raised the issue because he wasn’t completely comfortable with the existing service level, an issue not exposed by the superficial nature of the first call. At first blush, some salespeople might think that the first call went better. They would be wrong. The SECOND call went better, because now, knowing that an issue exists, the salesperson can work to fix it – thus increasing the probability of retaining the customer. Also keep in mind that the retention of the customer was actually the WORST case scenario; the best case scenario would have been engaging the customer in a discussion on additional stuff.
“So,” you’re saying, “that sounds great, Troy. But what if I’m already selling the customer everything I can?” Good question. In this case (and make sure it’s really true), you can still have an agenda. That agenda can and should be to produce some gain. Do I hear referrals? Yep, I think I do. Conduct a detailed business review and then ask for referrals. Regardless, you should go into retention-customer calls with an agenda. Here are five quick ways to build a good retention call:
1. Sell an additional item.
2. Sell a higher service level.
3. Sell a price increase (really).
4. Sell a higher quality item.
5. Ask for a referral.
Each one of the above agendas will smoke out customer objections, and potentially result in greater profit and volume from current customers. If that’s not a win-win, I don’t know what is.
Troy’s Truth of Selling: There is no better way to retain a current customer than to try to sell them something new.
