It is an obvious fact that relying on too few customers is a playing a very dangerous game.
If a significant amount of your total revenue as a business resides with just one or two customers and they suddenly decide to change their suppliers or their needs, then this has the ability to literally kill a business overnight.
A good client spread will minimise any risk associated with losing one or two of your customers which will inevitably happen for one reason or another. Having said that, you need to ensure that the client spread isn’t too big to manage and that can you still maintain the same levels of service with every customer.
The important thing is to ensure that your business development activities are broken down into three very distinct components – land, secure and expand.
Land
This is all about going out, filling up your sales pipelines and winning new business. This is the time to be asking yourself the following questions to ensure that your sales activity is focused, efficient and effective from the outset:
This is just the start, but it will set the playing field for how you will build a targeted new business strategy to win their business.
It will also clarify for you the exact number of customers you need to work with in order to hit your sales target, many of which will be brand new though some will also come from a blend any dormant customers that you have (ones that have spent money with you in the last three years, but not in the last 12 months) as well as from your existing client base.
This leads us nicely onto the next two areas of business development.
Secure
One of the biggest mistakes that companies do is oversell and under deliver to their customers, and then go back and try and sell them some more. You need to earn the right to go back into one of your customers and up-sell and/or cross-sell to them, and the most obvious way to do this is to over-deliver on what you sold them in the first place and then secure them. Ask yourself this:
If we can prove to both ourselves and the customer that they are getting more than they need from you, and we can lock them down with the relationship we have and a contract to back it up, then we can move on to the third and final stage of the process:
Expand
Mapping out the key decision influencers, as you would have done already (see land above), will certainly give you an insight into other areas of the customer’s business that you can target, but now is the time to take this further and create a comprehensive client map to give you a strategy behind what you are doing.
The key here is to identify all the opportunities within that customer, set some very clear targets towards the growth of the account and then create a strategy that builds upon our existing relationship within that customer, our proven expertise at over-delivering (see secure above) and that incentivises the customer to give you more business.
Again, when you look at the numbers of customers you actually need, the levels of business within each of those customers you can get and the highlighted opportunities you have from your client maps, you will find that achieving your sales quota from both new and existing customers is actually fairly simple… as long as you don’t forget to secure them along the journey.
Published by James Osborne July 31st 2014
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