How to get closer to your clients during downtimes

Economic downturns are almost nobody’s favorite time. For sales teams, they can signal lower incomes, more worry, and harder work that yields smaller returns.

But downturns can also present opportunities. One of the biggest opportunities of the current time is for sales teams to get closer to their clients.

Here’s how, and why.

Why you want to get closer to your clients right now

Much of the sales advice on offer in the marketplace, especially free advice, is provided by software companies and other organizations that have a vested interest in connecting with start-ups and fast-growth high-investment companies.

This advice focuses almost exclusively on prospecting, cold calling, and otherwise developing new contacts.

For most mature b2b companies right now, this is the wrong approach.

Cold calling, prospecting, and getting new logos in the door is an important part of any sales mix. But during an economic downturn, the best place a mature company can focus its primary attention is on growing current accounts. Research from The BAIN Company^* showed that it’s between 5 and 25 times less expensive to retain a customer than to attract a new one and that increasing customer retention by only 5% can increase profits by 29-95%.

• Trust matters more than ever as companies become more risk-averse
• The biggest reason that customers leave a vendor is that they don’t feel that they’ve received adequate attention
• Many organizations spend too little time understanding, aligning, and growing existing accounts
• Many accounts have substantial untapped potential for growth
• Many companies are reevaluating their vendor list and looking for greater trust and fewer vendors

In short, while prospecting for new accounts has become harder during COVID, getting closer to existing accounts has become more important. Customers are much more likely to let go of vendors when they have very little trust and much more likely to continue to invest and expand investment with those with whom they have a high level of trust.

How to get closer to your clients right now

One of the most important things any sales team can do right now is take the time to get clear about which existing clients have a high potential to grow with your company.

For instance, we engaged in an exercise recently to determine which of our partners are most likely to grow with us (and us with them). We looked at alignment, potential, commitment, and a variety of other factors that we determined were critical to understanding potential, then we created scorecards inside our signature account growth grid.

We did the same with our customers.

With that exercise done, our sales team was clear about where to prioritize their time. For each high potential account, we then created a growth plan that started with getting closer and building more trust.

This process starts with the customer themselves. Trust starts with curiosity and caring. This means having your sales team spend time researching existing clients, having conversations with contacts within the company, learning what they’re doing, what’s going on for them, and how they want you to work with them.

This is especially important right now, as most companies are adjusting how they do business to adapt to the environment created by COVID.

And that’s also where there is a substantial opportunity. As organizations continue to adapt and shift in response to the changing economic environment, your sales teams have an enormous opportunity to come in beside them and become trusted advisors.

While your competitors are hunting new logos in a shrinking environment, you can be focused on providing your high potential customers with so much value that they not only can’t live without you, they also want to spend more money with you.

Building this level of trust now will reap immediate term rewards, as well as establishing a firm foundation on which to grow together when the economy expands again.

Why you need to get in closer with more contacts at the same companies

While we’re on the topic of building and maintaining trust by getting closer to your accounts, let’s talk about one of the biggest problems salespeople have with existing accounts:

Too much attention on one or two contacts, not enough time spent building trust across the organization.

Focusing on one or two contacts within a company can sometimes yield immediate results and save time over building a coalition of trust. But in the long run, it’s like stacking blocks on top of each other, with only one small block at the bottom.

If that one block at the bottom collapses, the whole structure collapses.

Building trust across the organization ensures that as organizations restructure and reorganize, your relationship doesn’t get restructured out of the picture. It also helps your salespeople to identify and pursue new opportunities within the company, so they can add more blocks on top of the foundation of those first few sales.

Teach, encourage, and train your teams to engage with more people within your client organizations. At the same time, get more of your organization engaged with customers. Your product delivery, service delivery, customer success, sales, and even billing departments should be building an ongoing trusting relationship with the client, making sure they know they can rely on you and view you as a trusted advisor and partner. And for strategic accounts, your c-suite should be engaging with their c-suite.

Teach, encourage, and train your teams to engage with more people within your client organizations.

Of course, all this is only possible if you can prioritize and focus on the accounts that have true potential to grow with you. That’s why it’s so important to do the exercise I mentioned earlier. Membrain’s new account growth module (now in Early Access - coming in November) provides an easy way to organize and visualize this information so you can be sure you’re investing in profitable relationships.

Make sure your attention is quality attention

One big complaint from companies that leave a vendor is that they felt they weren’t getting enough attention. Yet these same companies probably received dozens of emails and at least a few phone calls on a regular basis. They might even have had an occasional drink or golf tournament with the vendor they left.

Attention isn’t just about quantity. It’s about quality.

Quality attention means being curious about the customer, finding out what matters to them, how they want to grow; what will help them to grow. It means wanting to know about their industry and helping them come up with ideas about how they can be more effective. It means being focused on outcomes and success, rather than just social time.

An occasional fun social outing can be good too, but in times like this, it’s especially important not to let that be your only interaction. Customers want results and positive outcomes, not just fun times.

Encourage your salespeople not to underestimate their own value. They probably know more than they realize, and they have the potential to be valuable to your customers with the right training and confidence. Because they interact with so many companies in the same industries and with the same needs, they can bring substantial industry information and insight to their customers, if they know to do it and are thinking in the right way about it.

Encourage your salespeople not to underestimate their own value.

Despite substantial economic changes and challenges, at Membrain we’re proud and excited to be continuing to grow. One of our core strategies has always been to get in close with our customers and partners and build trust based on co-creating value. We’re finding that this approach has led us to a strong position despite and perhaps even because of the economic downturn.

What are you doing in your company to get and stay close to your customers? Is it working out for you? I’d love to hear about it.