One of the most overlooked sources of lucrative revenue growth for your company is your company’s existing customer base. While many business owners beat the drum espousing the importance of current customers, I even have found that only a few companies have a comprehensive current customer growth strategy that’s communicated, monitored, and enthusiastically embraced by the whole organization.
Five techniques to teach your Employees to “grow” your existing customers.
1. Deploy your most important clients across the organization.
A critical first step to engaging your team with your growing customer streams is to share your simpler customer profile. make certain to incorporate your Best Customer Profile as a primary part of your new employee orientation. We all talk with new employees about procedures, policies, company history, and specific job duties. But rarely, if ever, can we allow them to know who our current best customers are, why they’re important, and therefore the profile characteristics of our greatest customers.
These customers are the lifeblood of the organization and wish to be top of mind with everyone. Continuously broadcast your most important clients across the organization. Everyone from the receptionist to CFO should receive a monthly “best client case study” that summarizes one of your best clients, and why the company is. and therefore the value of that customer.
2. Build Your Customer Preference Profile
The Customer Preference Profile was far and away from the foremost powerful tool we want to get more revenue from current clients. to create your Customer Preference Profile meet together with your team and make an inventory of knowledge elements you’d wish to capture for every customer.
Many business owners ask, “What kind of information must we collect? Other than clear contact information and demographic information, you may want information that helps you and your team sell more and better to your clients. For our concierge companies, we would like to capture customers’ dining, entertainment preferences, gift preferences, etc. If you’re selling business to business, you’ll want to understand your clients’ primary corporate objectives, upcoming strategic projects, budget season planning dates, key competitors, etc. the last word goal is to possess your team complete a Customer Preference Profile on each customer over time.
3. Train Your Employees to Be Detectives
You should develop your Customer Preference Profile — which addresses the “what” you ought to capture and therefore the “why” — to sell more to your current customers. Now comes the “how” Our primary training objective is to show our employees to consider themselves as detectives — to decipher the requirements of current best customers and to sleuth out new best customer prospects. Provide your employees with key questions they will use in daily phone and e-mail exchanges, in face-to-face interactions, in online surveys, etc., which will assist them in completing the Customer Preference Profile. Allow all employees to participate in thank-you notes, surveys, and customer site visits.
4. Keep Tabs on Your Customers with the Customer Activity Report
To assist workers to uncover new opportunities we developed and use the Customer Activity Report. This report provides a snapshot view of the specifics of the connection history with each customer, the number of transactions we had, his average transaction value, his last dates of purchase, the age of the client, and his active status. This tool is especially helpful in recapturing possible customer defectors and assists in timing marketing communications to the customer’s buying patterns.
5. Increase “Share of Customer”
Probably the foremost valuable tool after the Customer Preference Profile is that the Share of Customer Report. This tool should be one of the main drivers behind efforts to sell more to the current customers. the target here is to maneuver your customers across your products and services lines and capture a 100% share of your existing customers’ business.
The first step is to form a grid that lists all of your company’s products and services across the highest and therefore the annual potential customer spends the value of every line. The last column is the “total spend” value if a client purchased all of your services and products.
Next, list your most important customers at the bottom left side of the grid. Indicate which customers are buying which products and therefore the customers’ annual spend.
If the entire annual spend value per customer for all of your products is $3500 per annum and your current customer is spending $1000 on a couple of product lines, you’ve got the chance to capture a further $2500 per annum from this existing customer! And this is often a price-effective sales opportunity as you’ll not incur customer acquisition expenses.
These five techniques have truly transformed my business. the main target on the worth and potential of current customers across the organization helps us to take care of the stellar customer and client retention rates, to chop sales expenses, and to realize the simplest path to new revenue growth.
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