Solutions to help: Sell more to existing customers

Win deals against other current suppliers

If you have a good relationship with a customer in one area there’s always the potential to win more business from them. But they will often have other suppliers who are competing for that same wallet. They are probably all saying “how can we increase our wallet share” just like you are.

From your perspective, the customer is your customer. But from your competitor’s perspective the customer is their customer. And from the customer’s perspective, you’re probably just one of several suppliers.

From the perspective of a department or person who currently doesn’t use your products or services, but potentially could, you aren’t the incumbent – whoever they currently deal with is the incumbent.

You can use your status as an existing supplier to schedule a meeting but you still need to educate and build trusted relationships with people in other departments that aren’t currently using your products or services.

We help our Clients to increase their footprint in their customers and win a greater wallet share by building trusted relationships with people who you aren’t currently working with.

Give Account Directors quality support

Key Account Directors who focus on high value customers are talented sales people who can build relationships, talk strategy and win new business in their accounts. But the good ones are also very expensive and often hard to find and retain.

So it’s important to use them where they are most effective and give them the support they need to maximise their chances.

If you want to sell more to existing customers, especially in new business units or departments, there are many things that have to happen. Someone needs to find out who’s who, build relationships with PAs and EAs, organise meetings, follow them up, educate and nurture contacts at different levels of the organisation, keep track of changing roles and responsibilities and so on.

Managing this across dozens, sometimes hundreds of people in many departments and business units takes a lot of time and effort – time and effort that a Key Account Director could better spend selling.

We help our Clients to sell more to their existing customers by providing high quality support for their Key Account Directors, freeing them up to do what they do best by performing the many, varied and necessary tasks they don’t have bandwidth to do themselves.

We provide highly skilled and experienced, but more economical, resources supported by our ARM Business Platform and our cloud based WebONE Integrated Marketing Database freeing your most expensive people, your Key Account Managers, to earn their money by selling more.

Cover your existing accounts more effectively

Common wisdom says that it’s easier to sell to existing customers than to win new ones and this is true – to a point. But if you have a foothold in a large company it can still be challenging to break into new areas.

For example many companies have tens of thousands of employees and dozens of departments with the power to make their own decisions on what to buy. They also have many, many other suppliers.

You can’t just rely on osmosis if you want to increase your footprint in your customers, particularly your larger ones – you have to work on it.

If you’re trying to penetrate a new business unit or department in an existing customer you might be an existing supplier – but you aren’t the only one. As far as the decision makers in the new business unit people are concerned you may be a supplier but you aren’t their supplier – at least not yet.

It’s probably easier to make contact and get information using internal referrals but you still need to contact, educate, nurture and build trusted relationships with many people in multiple departments to win additional business.  The rewards can be huge but it takes a lot of planning and work.

We help our Clients to increase their footprint in their existing customers. Our consultants use our WebONE Integrated Marketing Database and our ARM Business Platform to help them to identify new contacts, uncover sales opportunities, schedule meetings and build relationships with people in the many departments and business units where there’s potential for more sales.