You know it has to be easier going back to the well! Cold calling strangers, even ones that should have the right problem you can solve, is tough. So why don’t more companies have a measured, tactical approach to “farming” their existing clients? Who knows, but here are my top 10 ideas to maximize your revenue from your fan base.
Top 10 Actions
- Establish a Company Fact Sheet on your key accounts. What does this look like? I’ve made it easy, here is a free pdf listing on what you should know. Free pdf.
- Establish Economic Values. I define this as the difference between what you can realistically sell them if all relevant profit centers in your client purchased your services, minus of course, what you’ve sold to date. Now of course for many reasons, a great client household name may have low economic value.
- Establish an Engagement Strategy. What’s your insightful angle of attack? How do you believe you can improve the life of the individual manager inside your client? Think client manager. Think people not company. People improve then companies improve.
- Build great diagnostic questions that will help you uncover the truth behind your client’s operation. My favorite sales process that is built around “Diagnosis” is called The Prime Process. See my take here.
- Conduct war room sessions with your management team to rehearse all the scenarios, all the ways your company can bring improved performance to a range of client managers.
- As part of your strategy be gutsy. Call at the highest possible level in the client account. Explain your engagement strategy. Ask for help on how to execute it.
- Consider after qualifying the size of the opportunity, a site visit. The Land and Expand strategy is essential for long term relationship building. But this visit needs an agenda. It needs to ensure the right people are available and the visit itself needs to add value to the client.
- Consider a strategic workshop with client senior management and your senior management. What could you be doing more of together?
- Consider long term framework arrangements on pricing and product collaboration.
- Review the possibility of detailed Case Study testimonials.
Closing deals with clients is the beginning of a relationship not the end. Build a Strategic Account Management Strategy and you will scale your business for the right reasons.
