An alternative approach to account management

“The toughest thing about the power of trust is that it’s very difficult to build and very easy to destroy. The essence of trust building is to emphasize the similarities between you and the customer.” – Thomas J. Watson

We all know that selling more to existing customers should be easy – right?

So why do we focus more time and energy on finding new customers?

The story so far…

I’ve spent the last six months at Green Gorilla Apps really analysing some big challenges within our business. Our projects have always been ad-hoc with unpredictable levels of repeat business due to the nature and type of our customers. Like most businesses, we are great at scoping, estimating and delivering on items from our sales pipeline but we have well established processes for that.

However, it struck me that our biggest challenge (and one that I avoided on a daily basis) was consistently selling value to our existing customers. Often dubbed the ‘low hanging fruit’ in sales training seminars, I’ve always struggled to sell more to existing customers without appear too salesy and pushy. I tried on multiple occasions to make ad-hoc phone calls to see how my customers were doing, but there was no real structure or value in this approach so the calls became increasingly less frequent.

I have to be honest and admit that if we are working on your project, we talk to you everyday. However, if you are a customer with no active project, we were terrible at account management.

Something had to change as the up and downs of ad-hoc projects was draining on myself, the team and cashflow.

The start of something…

I’d like to pinpoint the Eureka! moment but it wasn’t like that. Instead, I set 3 clear goals for the year:

1. Make all existing customers happy
2. Sell more to existing
3. Increase referrals from existing customers

Simple as it sounds, it’s ‘post it note’ level thinking and very linear. You can’t achieve goal 3, if bullet 1 isn’t true.

So I emailed every customer and scheduled a ‘review’ call, over a couple of weeks, so I could learn from every call. I didn’t want to cram them all in one afternoon, that would have destroyed the focus needed and my ability to listen.

One of my biggest fears before making the initial calls was actually knowing what to say. The customers I was about to ring had been customers for years, but the negative voice in my head convinced me that I was wasting their time and fishing for work. My pet hate is unwarranted sales calls!

I made the first call and it was nothing more than a conversation and 5 simple questions:

• What had we achieved together over the past months?
• What impact have these changes had on their business?
• What challenges were they facing today?
• What opportunities lay ahead for them?
• What were the clear next steps?

From the first call we setup a document and shared it amongst our team and theirs. We called it a ‘Roadmap’.

This was a small list of features, bugs, problems and ideas raised by the customer, not me. We discussed and prioritised the items based on urgency and importance.

As a result of this first call, we have a clear next step to estimate the top 3 priority items with the team and present a quote for each item.

The significant learning point for me after only 1 call was that I had only asked questions! The customer presented and prioritised their items, there was no selling!

Success!

I continued the process of repeating the approach for the next month: scheduled calls, creating a roadmap and prioritising items.

Two things happened:

1. We sold the top priorities and increased our sales from existing customers
2. We had a clear list of the next priorities for our customers, validated and documented. An existing customer sales pipeline!

3 easy steps to sell more to your existing customers

We’ve reviewed and refined the approach through multiple iterations over the past six months and the simple process can be boiled down to:

1. Setup a roadmap
2. Get your customers to own the roadmap and collaborate
3. Have a regular, scheduled review meeting to discuss the roadmap

That’s it!

Over the next editions of this blog, i’ll detail the transformational steps we have undertaken at Green Gorilla Apps regarding account management, to increase the regular, repeat business of each customer by at least 40%!