Find out what you’re missing about your current customers and grow your sales
Does the thought of picking up the phone and cold calling a prospect to sell your product or service send chills of fear down your spine? It does for most sane people. Fortunately, there are easy tactics you can use to grow your sales that don’t involve the horrors of cold calling.
You can expand your sales with the customers you have now by helping them solve their problems and accomplish their goals.
Get to know your current customers.
First, print out a list of your current customer accounts. Then play sleuth and find out what’s happening in their companies and industries.
This can be as easy as accessing your customers’ websites. Read the press releases they post, check out their mission statement and product descriptions. Get an understanding of the challenges they face in running and growing their businesses.
Look for opportunities to help your customers.
There’s an old saying that people don’t like to be sold, they like to be helped. Helping is much easier than selling, isn’t it? The trick is knowing where your customers need help. This can be easy too: just ask them! You can use the phone, email or face-to-face meetings to ask.
Your questions should be tailored to what you’ve discovered about your customers’ business environment. Also keep in mind that the question “How can we make your job easier?” is a powerful one, and you score points with customers just for asking it.
Here’s an example of how asking questions can lead to opportunities: Advantage Marketing recently consulted for a biotech company that does very complicated chemical analysis on a contract basis. We developed a short survey that the company partners conducted by phone to get their customers’ input.
When asked, “How can we make your job as a researcher easier?” one research scientist said he was too busy to write out the shipping forms to send his samples for analysis. Another scientist didn’t like to pay shipping fees when he had only one or two samples to send.
Other questions you can ask:
-
What other products or services can we offer that would help you?
-
What problems would these products or services help you solve?
-
Why would you find these solutions useful?
Pursue the best opportunities first.
After you’ve talked to your customers, go back to your account list and write down the opportunities to solve customer problems that you’ve uncovered. Then brainstorm to figure out how to use your products or services to help your customers. You may find that it’s best to develop a new product or service to solve customer problems. Develop an estimate of the revenues your proposed solutions can generate for your company.
When you’ve developed solutions for your customers, talk to them again and confirm that they’re interested. Then invest your resources in the solutions that have the best payoffs for your firm from both profitability and customer relationship perspectives.
Back to our biotech company example: Advantage Marketing had encouraged the firm’s partners to look for opportunities, so they brainstormed and developed a shipping program that makes it easier for the scientists to send samples.
Our biotech company sent an email about the new shipping program to the research scientists who mentioned the problem. The scientists loved it, and as a result, samples volume from those researchers is on the rise. The company is now expanding the program to other research institutions.
