Should your salespeople mainly invest their time in new relationships, or in existing customers? It is the eternal discussion within sales organizations. Salespeople often prefer to focus on new business, because this offers the most challenge. On the other hand, marketers appointed earlier this year customer retention as one of the main focuses. What is wisdom, which focus yields the most results?

An impossible choice

'Retaining a customer is cheaper than acquiring a new customer'. You've probably heard that statement many times before? Truth as a truism, no way to get in the way. But if you continue to rely on existing customers, no matter how good they may be, your organization will 'dry out' at some point. In other words, the focus has been too much on preservation, as a result of which no efforts have been made to discover new opportunities and explore new business opportunities. So the answer to our question is easy, there is no 'either-or'! In short, your focus should be on both achieving new business and customer retention. That is the only way for your sales team to achieve optimal success.

 

 

New business, how do you approach that?

New business is a broad concept. It includes picking up new leads, but also looking for new sales models and markets. A combination of sales and market research. Finding and especially developing new business takes a lot of time. If sales manager it is important to realize that. The salespeople who were born for new business development need time, a lot of time. Time in which they will not initially earn themselves back, which is significantly different from a pure sales employee. Give them enough time to spot potential and commit to it. Especially in the B2B sector, a business development period of between 6 and 12 months is absolutely not unusual. Another important facet associated with this approach is providing space. As a sales manager you want to see results, understandable! Where you can also closely monitor your sales employee in terms of targets, this is with pure new business development not smart. This causes a lack of confidence and therefore disappointing results. Give your people the space to choose their own path to new sales opportunities.

Golden rules for customer retention

Enough about new business. After all, it is cheaper to retain your customer than to acquire new customers. Marketers always consider customer retention to be extremely important, but in practice little action is often put into words. Do you really want to take action? Then take into account the following 'golden rules' from practice:

No hourly invoice

If customers are allergic to something in a long-term relationship, it is the 'hourly invoice mentality'. If you have been working for a customer for years, you should show your gratitude to him or her by not always sending an invoice for everything. Of course, within the framework of reasonableness.

Run for your customer

Really committed to customer retention also means making a distinction between your various customers. For example, by giving priority to a loyal customer in the event of tight capacity. Show that you care about your loyal customers!

Why do they choose you?

Your customer probably chose you for various reasons. Do you know why? Formulating an answer to this question will enable you to serve your customer much better.

Share of wallet

Your most loyal customers often provide a large part of your turnover. But are you already getting the most out of the customer? Are there perhaps adjacent products/services that you can also offer that will help the customer and allow you to build up a larger share of wallet?

Profitable? 

A danger that always lies with long-term customer relationships is the profitability of a customer. If you do not allow your prices to increase with the development of the market and economy, or if you take a step TOO far for your customer, you run the risk that a customer project is no longer profitable. So make a cost-benefit analysis for every project and every customer.