Create a process that touches customers with relevant ideas that are neither sales pitches nor marketing campaigns
To communicate a credible value proposition, you need to understand your customer’s business. To deliver value, you must be committed to your customer’s success. Unfortunately, the structure of most businesses supports the former more than the latter. Enterprise sales reps get compensated for closing big deals. Once the deal is closed, the rep moves on to the next account, to return in a year, or two, or three, when it’s time to renew the contract.
If salespeople doen’t touch the customer between sales cycles, and support reps only do so when the customer asks for help, then who is really managing the relationships with your top accounts? What happens to customer relationships between contract renewals?
Chapman Kelly is a leader in healthcare compliance and cost-containment services for Fortune 500 companies. Michael Browning, director of strategic development, described the processes his company has put in place to prevent voids and dips in customer relationships. The company understood early that not all customer contact is created equal. Simply sending an e-mail, calling on the telephone and saying hello, or “checking in” does not provide the customer with value or develop greater trust. “We want the information to be useful and valuable—this makes it about the customer. We try to take the customers’ point of view and figure out what would be valuable to them,” explained Michael. Chapman Kelly makes contacts and communication educational and useful and creates interactions that help build the company’s reputation as a subject matter expert that can help solve problems.
Michael helps his sales force create such interactions by giving salespeople good reasons to stay in touch with clients during the downtime between project completion and the time when clients are ready to buy again. To create content that will be valuable to customers, Chapman Kelly asks its services organization and business development people to create articles based on real deployments. In addition, the small business development staff, made up of people who understand both sales and marketing, uses Google alerts and keyword searches on target industries and customers to provide a constantly updated sales toolbox with timely discussion topics and articles. The company also created a system that reminds salespeople to contact customers based on preset time intervals or milestones within ongoing projects. Sales reps always have relevant and interesting content to share. The engagement tools are available to the company’s extended sales force. Brokers also get information they can use with clients and even brand as their own.
The result of such ongoing relationship management is a completely transformed sales process. “Many times if we’re able to form a close relationship with the client, the competitive request for proposal process is not even necessary. If the client is required or prefers to issue a competitive RFP, our position means we can help define the RFP and suggest criteria, questions, or requirements that our competitors may have a difficult time meeting,” commented Michael.
Don’t leave the task of creating an ongoing dialogue to sales reps. They focus on the next big deal and often lack the time to figure out and use complex news services, or to seek out and deliver information to customers without immediate sales opportunities. Create a process that touches customers with relevant ideas that are neither sales pitches nor marketing campaigns but, rather, relevant and timely resources for their business.