Like most things in life, the answer to the challenge of creating revenue opportunities usually lies in our own backyards. In the world of sales, that often means our current customer base.
Think about it. How many of your customers have untapped potential? Might you have opportunities to:
• Displace competitors who co-exist with you in some accounts?
• Do things that customers are doing themselves in-house?
• Do new things that aren’t being done at all in customer companies?
Be not afraid
But this is a blinding insight into the obvious. Everyone knows that too many customers buy only a fraction of what they could. So why don’t salespeople pursue those opportunities more than they do? Fear!
Salespeople – and this is usually quite subconscious – tend to be afraid of appearing to be going over or around their existing contacts. It’s an I-just-want-to-leave-well-enough-alone thing.
There’s also the unspoken fear of, “Exactly what do I say to my current contacts to start the investigation?” Salespeople have learned that the Sales 101 questions don’t work: “Do you have any other needs?” or “What else do you have going on?” or “Is there anyone else I should be talking to?” That’s why the starting point in this process is not about looking for other needs, it’s about better understanding the customer’s business. After all, where do customer needs come from?
Request a different kind of meeting
If you want to get different kinds of results from your current customers start by having a different kind of meeting. Try this. Take the five customers that you believe have the most growth potential. Identify your best contact. Call that contact and request a different kind of meeting. You want to have a meeting that is dedicated to leaving the day-to-day stuff at the door and attempting to learn more about the customer’s overall business.
Pay tediously close attention to your words
However, the way you request this meeting over the phone is where it will succeed or fail. For example, avoid the phrase, “different kind of meeting”” (can sound experimental). Instead, use the phrase, “Go in a little different direction than we normally do when we meet.”
Here’s an example of this phone dialog (please note that this is written as a spoken dialog): “Jill, I’d like to get together. This time, though, I’d like to go in a little different direction than we normally do when we meet. Typically, we’ve got technical issues and the like that we have to work through. However, I think it’s safe to say that, right now, there aren’t any particularly pressing issues that we have to deal with, right? [wait for agreement from Jill]. So what I’d like to do when we meet this time is to take a step back and make sure I’m keeping my arms around the bigger picture business issues there at XYZ. On the one hand, I certainly have an understanding of your business. At the same time, I don’t want to make too many assumptions about just how good that knowledge is, I mean, clearly, the better we understand how you guys tick as a business the more value we’ll continue to be able to bring you…make sense? [Jill: “Yup, makes sense to me.”]. Great, got your calendar handy?”
Leave the products at the door
While the request for the meeting is the hardest part of the process, you’re not out of the woods yet. You still have to do what, to many in sales, is the unthinkable – leave the products at the door. During the course of the meeting you are likely to see opportunities for your product/company. It takes incredible skill and discipline not to start pitching when you do. Manage the pursuit of these opportunities by making a more or less “passing” reference to them at the end of the meeting and suggesting some kind of follow-up. The key is not to have the meeting appear as nothing more than a veiled fishing trip – because, frankly, it is more than just a fishing trip.
Harvesting revenue from current customers is where I end up helping the vast majority of my clients. One client company took this idea – more importantly, the language – to heart and, over a two-year period, estimates that revenues grew incrementally by 30 percent and margins by more than 50 percent.
After seeing this payback there was a collective slapping of the forehead among leadership and the salespeople alike with a simple exclamation along the lines of, “This almost seems too easy!” They’re not giving themselves enough credit. They succeeded with it because they did pay tediously close attention to the language. Remember the old Hoosier saying, “Knowin’ it ain’t the same as doin’ it!”
