CHAPTER 10

Entering the VORTEX: How to Build a Path to High Engagement and New Opportunities

In chapter 9, we focused on segmenting our customer base according to potential for growth, and identifying and removing from our customer base unprofitable customers with no potential for growth.

In this chapter, we will focus on growing the three customer segments—service, growth, and key accounts. Each segment does not require a separate growth strategy, because the core strategy is the same for all three segments: More engagement means more business. The deeper your relationship with the customers in those segments, and the more people you know within the customer organization, the more likely that you are going to perceive and create sales opportunities because you understand the client’s needs and potential needs. Similarly, you are much more likely to be approached with sales opportunities by clients who trust you and know what you can offer.

As shown in Figure 10–1, developing the depth and the breadth of your customer relationship means a higher level of engagement between you and your customer. As a result, your service and your growth accounts will move toward the key accounts quadrant, and your key accounts will move farther into the sweet spot in the northeast corner of your matrix. The result of this movement is more revenues for all three types of accounts. (Remember, your maintenance accounts are already maxed out, so we’re not going to talk about them in this chapter.)

Once you have a close and productive relationship with as many people connected to the customer as possible, the next step is to exploit those contacts with targeted discussions, interactions, and activities that have the best chances of leading to new sales.

In the first part of this chapter, we will focus on deepening your current relationships and multiplying your contacts throughout the customer organization to give you the maximum opportunity to make new sales. In the second part of the chapter, we will introduce the VORTEX Framework, with components and activities that will transform relationships and new contacts into sales opportunities.

Figure 10–1. The Sales Leader Classification Model Moves Northeast

INCREASE YOUR RELATIONSHIP VALUE: FROM PERSONAL TO CORPORATE RAPPORT

To be fully engaged with your customers, you need to develop three kinds of rapport:

1. Personal rapport: The goal here is not to talk about your kids, but to show the customer that you see him or her as more than a conduit to money.

2. Business rapport: With this type of relationship, the customer sees you as a resource committed to his success, and not just a supplier of products or services.

3. Corporate rapport: Corporate rapport is a mindset in which you view your customers as more than the individuals with whom you have a relationship.

Figure 10–2 illustrates how building the three rapports increases the value of the relationship. You are now more committed to your customers, and they to you. There is more mutual trust and respect, which might have been there before, but not as intensive.

Figure 10–2. Three Levels of Rapport

Let’s see how to improve the three types of relationships listed above.

Build Personal Rapport

The development of personal rapport is perhaps one of the most well-known and traditional sales techniques and I will not go into detail in this book about how to build personal rapport. What is not often talked about, however, is the fine balance sellers must walk to enhance their personal rapport. You are not in business to gain friends! You are in business to develop trusting, profitable relationships for both you and your client. To do this you must balance your personal relationship with the client with your transactional relationship.

When you call on a client, is the conversation always about reordering, upgrading, or writing a check? If so, you’re heavy on the transactional communication and constantly asking for money, which will wear on the client and erode personal rapport.

Instead of focusing only on transactions with each call, build in personal communication. Show the clients you care about them. But let’s be clear, I’m not talking about conversations about kids, holidays, and hobbies. Modern, sophisticated buyers see right through that. Leave these to social occasions, conferences, and networking events. What is important during a business meeting (or call) is showing the client you remember your last conversations.

Start your conversations with:

   “When we spoke last you …”

   “I was thinking about what you said last week and …”

   “I know you were away in Bermuda last week …”

   “I remember that X was important to you …”

These statements show the client that you have been listening, and whenever clients feel listened to, your personal relationship with them is enhanced. Enhancing your personal relationship is the first step to Growth.

You will find excellent resources on how to build personal rapport at www.nonstopsalesboom.com.

Build Business Rapport

Today’s client requires a deeper relationship with you than ever before: business rapport.

Establish yourself as a resource for your clients. Introduce them to potential clients or employees. Put them on a client advisory panel, asking their opinion and input, which will give them an intrinsic sense of ownership and investment in your company and product. Provide research and benchmarking to show them how they are performing relative to others in their markets and conduct business reviews to showcase your knowledge of their business and your understanding of their goals; offer ideas about how they can reach those goals faster. Ensure that your company and you as an individual are participating in thought leadership conferences, professional development, and other reputation-building activities. (Even better, invite them to co-present with you highlighting a joint success.)

When companies hire me to conduct exit interviews of the clients they have lost, two-thirds state clearly that they leave because they feel their previous seller had become indifferent to their needs. You can’t grow business in a client that leaves you. And I know you are not indifferent to their needs. Chances are, you are just not showcasing your interest and involvement. Once a month or more, work on business rapport with those clients you are actively trying to grow. Schedule a mailing, a call, or a meeting where you highlight your business acumen relative to their business and your Sales Radar will be filled with Growth opportunities.

I was attending a large sales meeting with over 350 sellers from a multinational bank. On stage was the chief financial officer from its largest client discussing his ideal relationship with the bank. He said, “You think that you are doing me a favor by coming in to see me every six months to update me on my accounts. But I need you here every month educating me on what’s going on at the bank, in the worldwide investment markets, and in my accounts. I am extremely busy. How am I supposed to keep up with the information and sort out what’s important if we are not sitting down to talk each month?” The room went silent as it had never occurred to these sellers that their clients saw meeting with them regularly as an asset.

Build Corporate Rapport

Don’t underestimate the power of not only having a good relationship with your main point of contact at an organization, but also having excellent rapport with other people within the client. With the amount of turnover in most companies, it’s a mistake to assume that a great and loyal contact within the organization will necessarily equate to a secure relationship with the client.

A few years ago a client of mine was managing a multimillion-dollar staffing services contract. The customer was the marquee key account for our client, but problems cropped up when their main contact, the vice president of human resources, was forced out of the company quickly, and quite unpleasantly. Let’s just say she was escorted out of the building and her key pass was shredded immediately! When the new vice president was hired, she did a complete review of services. And, because our client had not developed any corporate rapport, and was associated with the old regime (which had been poisoned internally), there were no additional relationships to turn to, and no advocate fighting on their behalf. Not one other employee of the customer stood up and said to the new vice president that our client’s services were necessary to do their jobs; no executives considered them integral to the company (or even knew about them). As a result, they appeared as “just a vendor,” and lost a million dollars of their contract to a competitor within three months of the new executive taking over.

A salesman with a large multinational client of mine once managed a key account for his company. This key account was worth a million dollars in current revenue with growth potential of several orders of magnitude. The salesman’s relationship with the chief operations officer (COO) was sound and since this COO made all the decisions in the account, the salesman felt he had no need to develop other contacts. I distinctly remember him telling me, “Don’t worry, Colleen. The COO loves me; I have this account sewn up.”

Shortly thereafter the COO left (with no warning) and was replaced by an outsider whose first job was to review all vendor relationships. The seller did not have any allies in the account who reported to the new COO. Nor did he have any allies at equal executive levels to the COO. As a result, no one fought internally on his behalf. And so, as this seller was also tied to the old regime, he was easily replaced and a million dollars of current business plus the future potential evaporated in two months. That seller was never able to recover the account or find the revenue in new accounts. He left the company within a year.

You can’t build a Nonstop Sales Boom by only having one contact in each account—no matter how powerful that contact appears to be. Luckily for you situations such as those above are easy to preempt. While you can never know when your buyers will leave, get fired, or go through mergers and acquisitions, you will mitigate your risk by building and maintaining multiple relationships. And in doing so, you will grow your business at the same time!

While it’s wonderful to have a quality relationship with each of your clients, don’t underestimate the value of quantity. People move on; give yourself the insurance of having established a reputation in multiple areas of your client’s organization.

Traditional salespeople only pay attention to personal rapport and in doing so create the boom–bust cycles of sales results we discussed in Chapter 1. Perpetual sales boomers pay close attention to all three rapport types, resulting in a Sales Radar full of new opportunities for growth (and commissions)!

CONNECTING THE CORPORATE PLAYERS

Smart sales leaders work hard at connecting corporate players within their clients as a way of enhancing corporate rapport and ensuing growth. To connect corporate players effectively you must develop multiple contacts inside your accounts, create a community of advocates inside your best clients, and then connect them with their peers inside your own company. This is what leads to internal referrals and new opportunities.

Simply creating relationships without the connection is like building railway stations without connecting tracks or houses without streets. The connectivity makes for railroad systems and neighborhoods—the whole being greater than the sum of the parts.

Think of this process as infiltration. It’s about building a community. When done well, a corporate community will win you a broad base of support throughout the organization, while building a library of knowledge about how that client’s business operates (e.g., who makes decisions, what are their strategic objectives, what is their business plan for the future). Infiltration is about more than mining a corporate hierarchy for influential decision makers. It’s about becoming an insider, not just a partner. Every point of contact has value. Every conversation is a good conversation—whether it’s with a CEO or a gatekeeper. Insight comes in many forms, and each contact you make in that corporate community plays a role in the sales process. You will never lose business by forming too many of these relationships, but you’re sure to lose business if you create and connect too few of them.

Some examples include:

   A VP of strategic accounts for a consumer credit company created a private, corporate community on LinkedIn connecting the 40 members on his team who manage the client with over 200 contacts on the client site. The daily communication and transparency of this community helped to maintain and grow a $45 million per year account with a major investment company.

   Top sellers at a medical devices company take their executive team on the road for a series of day long meetings with the executives of each of their biggest hospital clients once a year for a day of planning. They call these events “client days” and spend three-quarters of the time reviewing the client’s goals and objectives combined with an industry overview. Only the end of the day is focused on the seller’s business, showing a product roadmap and discussing those new innovations that are in alignment with the client’s objectives. This is a unique approach because most sellers simply show up and present what they want first, rather than listening to their client’s future plan and then tailoring their presentation on the fly to meet the client’s needs.

   U.S.-based feed, seed, and fertilizer manufacturers routinely host meetings bringing together salespeople, agronomists, product specialists, and executive leadership from their company to meet with the sellers, buyers, agronomists, and leaders of their retail clients.

   The VP of enterprise sales for an office supply chain creates an internal user group at each of his biggest clients. What this means is that he connects the department heads for all the departments and divisions that are buying from him. This internal community creates two benefits for the buyer. One, they are able to see how others are using the product to be more effective, and two, they are able to create an internal buying group that helps to streamline purchases and create savings on bigger orders. The seller benefits by getting internal referrals more easily because the internal user group actively encourages other departments to join. As well as benefitting from larger orders—bringing greater revenue and saving his company money in delivery costs—the seller is creating buyer loyalty ensuring that the competition doesn’t make inroads.

   An executive in the paper business at Supremex connected corporate players to create emotional communities with his best clients and vendors each year, making sure that his sellers, sales leaders, and plant managers were all included in community-building and developing relationships with the buyers and users of their product. (You see, I come by my focus honestly. This recently retired executive is my dad.)

MULTIPLYING CONTACTS IN CUSTOMER ORGANIZATIONS: THE ISO RELATIONSHIP MATRIX

The previous section talked about deepening current relationships through personal and business rapport, and broadening relationships throughout company clients through corporate rapport. In this section, we’re going to talk more specifically about how to multiply your contacts in an organization. You must first begin with four questions, listed below with the reason for their importance:

1. What departments are affected by my product or service besides the one I sold to originally? This question is important because if your project affects other teams, you should meet them and find out what success or challenges you are causing the other groups. Perhaps a sales or retention opportunity will be found in meeting these teams.

2. What departments do my buyers work most closely with? This question is important because if your buyer works closely with other departments or divisions these could be ISOs for you. For example, marketing and customer service departments often roll out client management software after a sales department has done so, because they work closely together and see the benefit of sharing a single source of data.

3. Who does my buyer report to and who is his or her direct report? This question is important because you need to have access to the future power, backup power, and ultimate power for the best ISOs. What if your buyer leaves?

4. Who is using the product? This question is important because getting to know the users of your product or service will allow you to build relationships with future buyers as well as to receive testimonials and case studies to use internally.

Once you have the answers to these four questions you can create an ISO Relationship Matrix (as shown in Figure 10–3) to help you identify whom to meet and then develop strategies on how to meet them. In each box you should have the name and title of the person you want to meet.

As you can see, this matrix is a modified organization chart focused only on those departments or divisions that are relevant to your buyer and your potential to grow or maintain the account.

Add as many departments or divisions as you need for the most complete matrix of the account you are managing. You might have six rows across and five down or two across and four down, depending on the complexity of your account and scale of your product. Don’t worry about the size of the matrix. Only worry about the accuracy of the matrix based on the goals you have for the account.

Figure 10–3. ISO Relationship Matrix

If you wish to download extra working copies of the ISO Relationship Matrix you can do so from www.nonstopsalesboom.com.

If your matrix is full of titles and no names, this is your cue to sit down and work with your few (or only) contacts in the account to fill out the details. Once you have the information documented, ask for their help in making the introductions. A simple question such as “Can you help me with an introduction?” or “Can I tell them that I work with you?” will work for you to receive the green light to call the new contacts.

OWN THE NEW RELATIONSHIP BEFORE INTRODUCING OTHERS INTO IT

As the seller on the account, the accountability for the relationship and its growth stops with you. As such, after you have identified each new contact in your account and asked for an introduction, meet with them yourself, first. You must own these relationships before you introduce others from your company.

Of course, if your managers, leaders, or teammates from other departments have been engaged with the client during the Attraction and Participation states, encourage these relationships to continue, but also deepen them by developing your own relationship with these contacts.

Never allow yourself to be cut out of a relationship inside the accounts you manage. This will erode your Sales Radar view and reduce the number of ISOs you can create and see.

Only after you have met each new contact personally should you take the time to match your new contacts with additional contacts inside your company. Creating this high level of infiltration deepens corporate rapport, protecting your account from erosion to the competition and putting you in the best position to grow. Some examples of doing this include:

1. You develop a relationship with the COO, the director of operations, and three warehouse managers during the Participation state of your Sales Radar. After implementation, you ask for a tour of one of the facilities and take along your manager as well as a technical support lead from your office. During the tour you meet with five warehouse employees who are all using your new resource planning software.

2. Your initial buyer is the owner of a small business and during the project kickoff you meet the comptroller and the sales manager. During a project status meeting you bring your customer service contact for the client and a specialist to meet the employees most affected by the project, and you bring your manager to meet the business owner and their leadership team.

3. A long-standing client of yours has new opportunities to grow because it has just opened offices in several new international locations. You arrange for a meeting to include your existing executive contacts as well as their new managers from the overseas divisions, and include team members from your company who are fluent in the foreign languages native in the new acquisitions.

4. A client of yours has been bought by the competition. You have a great relationship with a vice president who has been let go and a manager who is staying. You ask the manager for a referral to the new vice president and take your vice president along to build a peer-to-peer relationship.

Never underestimate the power of the peer-to-peer relationship in building corporate rapport. I once had a buyer at a major motion picture company tell me, “If you want our vice president of Legal at this meeting you’d better bring your president. He simply won’t work with anyone below him.” While I didn’t like the attitude, I took that directive to heart, and bought a ticket for my president to make the flight. We dealt with the vice president of Legal together and in that one meeting closed a multimillion-dollar incremental sale with our client.

THE VORTEX FRAMEWORK: TRANSFORMING RELATIONSHIPS INTO SALES

In the first part of the chapter, I’ve described how to improve the quality and the quantity of your relationships with your customers and customer organizations. You have multiplied your contacts so that even many of your service accounts and growth accounts are now on the path to becoming key accounts. But you must now push hard to transform all of the contacts and relationships you’ve developed into new sales from current customers. The VORTEX Framework can guide you in this quest. It consists of a set of components that will inspire a variety of sales activities, some of which are featured later in the chapter.

When I survey buyers, 70 percent of them tell me that consistent and relevant information from their sellers is critical to their making a buying decision. In digging deeper, they define “consistent” as one or two times a month and “relevant” as being important to them personally and/or professionally related to their exceeding their goals.

Knowing this, I am constantly amazed at the number of sellers who do nothing to encourage Growth within their own customer list.

Your Growth potential is only as high as your clients’ perceived quality of your relationship with them. To improve this perception and grow each account you must transition your thinking from “managing an accounts list” to “building a relationship with my client.”

You will create a profitable relationship with your customers using the following VORTEX components:

   V is for variety.

   O is for occurrence.

   R is for reliability.

   T is for truth.

   E is for engaging.

   X is for excellence.

Let’s take a look at these components one by one.

Variety

Recent studies from the Information Marketing Association show that your current clients can tolerate up to 200 contacts per year before they will consider you a stalker—as long as you provide a variety of touch points. For the record, I am not suggesting that 200 is the right number for you. I use this extreme study to show you that you probably are not doing nearly enough. Most companies we survey on behalf of sellers want to hear from them between 12 and 52 times a year.

The reason customers can withstand up to 200 touches per year is because smart salespeople know to mix up the media types they use to contact their customers. You can’t call a customer 200 times a year without getting on the do-not-call list. You can call, email, mail, and fax; send them to your web store; use audio and video; attend networking events, trade shows, and fundraisers; make in-person sales calls; use article placements in trade journals; and send gifts and advertising specialties. To increase the number of opportunities in your Sales Radar you must increase the kinds of media you use to reach out to your clients in order to increase the frequency with which you reach out to them.

Occurrence

How often are you in touch with your clients? Regardless of whether 12 or 52 touches are appropriate for you, don’t let the number cloud my real message to you: You are likely not doing enough. In my work, most companies and sales professionals feel that if they reach out four times a year, they are stalking the client. Personally I believe that 26 is the minimum number of touches required each year for a truly profitable relationship.

Using component #1, variety, you can build strong relationships with your clients by delivering valuable information on a regular basis using a variety of media types. Once every two weeks will not be overwhelming. I mentioned Donald from The Placement Office earlier in this book. He executes VORTEX flawlessly. He reaches out to his clients every two weeks using in-person meetings, mail, and the telephone.

Reliability

All 26 touches should be sent on a regular schedule. Your customers will come to expect them and, hopefully, look forward to them. You might consider sending a monthly email newsletter, combined with a bimonthly hard-copy newsletter at two-week intervals. You could advertise a free monthly webinar or teleclass for your clients on product training or business topics complementary to your products. You could schedule a client advisory meeting for key accounts every four or six weeks. Trust is built with consistent behavior over time. Consistently and reliably delivering your message to your clients will demonstrate you can be trusted to deliver what you said, when and how you said it. This will lead to growth. Clients don’t like surprises; they like results.

In order to build a relationship with your clients you must maintain constant contact with them without lapse or interruption. What do you think would happen to the relationship with your spouse if you unexpectedly didn’t come home one night, and didn’t call, didn’t email, didn’t text-message, and then arrived home again unexpectedly three months later? When you don’t call your friends for weeks at a time, does your relationship grow stronger or weaker?

I have often thought that the sales relationship is similar to the dating or courting relationship. Regular contact at consistent intervals is key. You can’t build a personal relationship without regular communication. Likewise with business relationships. If you don’t call, your clients will build a relationship with someone else (i.e., your competitor) who does. Use a reliable scheduling system and never miss a meeting. Donald’s clients are so tuned into his schedule of contact that his best clients now call if a touch point is late or missing. This loyalty has led to year-over-year growth every year for the six years I have been working with Donald and his team.

Truth

Truth is as important as variety and reliability. Whatever you send, discuss, or do has to be true of you and your company’s brand. It has to provide real value. Don’t just “pitch” your clients each time you reach out to them. Share valuable ideas, industry data, your favorite books on business, and your thoughts on articles they might find useful that can help them grow your business—while showcasing the true “you” of you and your company. For example, Harley Davidson’s owners in North America receive road atlases with highlighted scenic motorcycle trips. Luxury retailer Kate Spade publishes restaurant and sightseeing tips in its staff’s favorite cities, and Costco publishes a business-focused magazine for its corporate members.

Another truth? Remember that you are selling to a fellow human being, not a faceless corporate entity.

Engaging

Be entertaining and friendly, yet professional. Your clients want to have fun; they want to laugh and they want to enjoy doing business with you. Your relationships will not grow if you are miserable to be around. Which airlines command the most customer attention during the preflight safety announcements—those on Southwest and WestJet, or those on the traditional airlines such as American, United, Air Canada, and US Airways? Southwest and WestJet are more engaging because they make the announcements fun and friendly while still being professional.

Make sure that every contact attempt you make is worth opening, reading, and acting on. A banking client of mine recently sent 30 invitations to an art auction to his 30 best customers. It was a fun event sponsored by his bank that showed a more human side to their business. All 30 said no, but six proactively asked for follow-up appointments because they wanted to revisit their portfolios and add new services.

Excellence

Clients want to be associated with winners, with people who excel at everything they do. So always look and act the part. Your materials must be top-notch, your conversations on trend, and your appearance that of a top seller. An easy way to accomplish this is to always have success stories to share. When you are sharing with your clients (in writing or conversation) how other clients like them have succeeded, you are explicitly giving them new ideas to benefit their business as well as implicitly showing them that you are a success. The more good they see you doing in the market, the more they will want to be a bigger part of your community.

So, what else do we need to know? As defined by www.dictionary.com, a vortex is “something regarded as drawing into its powerful current everything that surrounds it.” And this is how you want your customers to react to you. When you create a vortex you draw toward you everything you touch, and, combined with the power of referrals (discussed in Chapter 13), those people your clients reach out to will also be drawn in. Thus, your network and circles of influence are expanded and the power of the vortex is increased.

Using the six VORTEX components as a guide, I have provided some ideas in Figure 10–4, ideas that other Engage clients are using today. No need to follow slavishly; this list is to get you started thinking about what VORTEX activities would be suitable for your clients. Keep in mind that not all accounts are created equal in terms of their Growth potential, which is why I have suggested some activities for key accounts that you might not provide to a service account.

Figure 10–4. VORTEX Activities

Using the chart as a guide, a seller of enterprise software to large organizations might have the following VORTEX plan:

Month 1: A handwritten thank-you card is sent in the mail within three days of the purchase. The client is added to the company newsletter and the first issue is sent.

Month 2: A site visit is arranged for all of the implementation team to visit the client’s site and meet the key players. At the same time a kickoff meeting could be conducted to ensure the project starts smoothly.

Month 3: An updated research paper that was conducted by your association is sent to the client with highlighted sections that you think will be most interesting to the client.

Month 4: Your company’s quarterly newsletter is sent containing new product announcements, client success stories, and company news. This could be sent to your buyer but also anyone in the account who could benefit from its content. Don’t be shy in asking your contacts (especially those in your ISO matrix) if they want to be subscribed!

Month 5: You invite the client to tour your facility and meet the developer who is working on the client’s installation.

Month 6: You host a lunch and learn which individuals in your client’s office are best suited to introduce other departments to your solution.

Month 7: Your company’s quarterly newsletter is sent containing new product announcements, client success stories, and company news. Month 8: You host your first business review of the progress to date and document any red flags. At this meeting you also lay out the plan for what is coming.

Month 9: You invite the client to be your guest at an industry event. You introduce the client to their peers at other similar companies and ask to have your client featured in the next company newsletter.

Month 10: Your company’s quarterly newsletter is sent containing new product announcements, your client success stories, and company news.

Month 11: You organize peer-to-peer meetings between your executive team and the client’s executive team in order to build relationships and strengthen the corporate rapport.

Month 12: You have a one-year anniversary business review meeting to summarize the year and plan for the next 12 months.

A word about this plan: Remember my personal belief in a 26-touch minimum? I haven’t abandoned it. The plan above is a guide that doesn’t include project deliverables such as the weekly status report during the implementation phase, or the training sessions for additional staff.

The beauty of developing a VORTEX plan like our software vendor’s is that you only have to think of the activities once and then simply execute them each month. I suggest keeping a log of the activities in your client file so you can see what’s been completed and what is still to be delivered. Once you’ve created the VORTEX plan, immediately schedule the time to complete each task in your calendar each month. If you don’t schedule the time, you will not execute on your plan! (The best sellers we work with create an annual schedule in their calendars so that none of the VORTEX activities are missed.)

WHERE THE MAGIC HAPPENS

You want your customers buying from you because they have a stronger relationship with you than any other provider and because it’s clear to them that you deliver more value. When your clients think to come to you first even if it is less convenient, or they feel guilty about dividing allegiance, and they readily refer you to others, you have created a VORTEX relationship. You will have more permission, more tolerance, and more acceptance of your promotions and offers when you have achieved this VORTEX relationship. The by-product of this is, of course, a Nonstop Sales Boom.

Growth of your current accounts is critical to creating a Nonstop Sales Boom and here’s why. Most businesses have an average closing rate of about 25 percent. So, for every four new opportunities that come their way, they close just one of them. And that’s not too bad. The problem, however, is that those same businesses tend to lose half of their customers every five years. That kind of churn, if it’s not supported by an incredible influx of new business, can make it exceedingly difficult to grow.

Stronger businesses, on the other hand, close deals at a stronger clip—around 33 percent, or one of every three opportunities that cross their paths. But their customer retention rates are better, too—generally in the neighborhood of 70 percent. As a result, those companies possess stronger leverage and can grow their business more profitably.

Truly breakthrough companies—those that create Nonstop Sales Booms—are even more remarkable, but not because their closing ratios on net new business are any better. In most circumstances, that ratio is still around 33 percent. But here’s where the magic happens: Those businesses boast client retention rates of about 95 percent, and they’re able to efficiently drive profitability by selling new products and services to those existing clients every year.

A business review meeting, the second activity listed in the VORTEX Activities chart (Figure 10–4), is one of the best tools I have found for growing clients. At a minimum you should be conducting them twice a year for maintenance, key, and growth accounts and once a year for your high-potential service accounts. For the multinational clients I work with business reviews are held quarterly due to the complex nature of the projects and massive size of the accounts.

A property and casualty insurance company once told me that they had their agents do annual business reviews for the biggest 20 percent of their corporate accounts once a year at the end of the policy year. They bragged that this was industry standard but they were ignoring the link between not being in front of their clients often enough and two troubling trends in their overall business.

   Trend one: The competition was doing a midyear meeting in an effort to take the business and they were being successful 50 percent of the time.

   Trend two: 100 percent of these key accounts were shopping around for the best rates each year, causing the sellers to have to work harder to close the sale and discount rates to keep the business.

When we increased the cadence for the business reviews to quarterly for the top 10 percent and biannual for the top 25 percent, midyear policy replacements from the competition stopped and clients’ shopping behavior was cut in half.

Business reviews are critical to Growth because they ensure you are in front of the client more often than the competition, building deeper relationships with increasing numbers of people and delivering them value beyond the expectations of the project.

A business review is not a sales meeting. And this is precisely why it is such a great tool for growth. Business reviews are your opportunity to have a value-based discussion focused on the client’s needs and interests in four areas.

1. The current levels of value (tangible and intangible) that the client is receiving from you now and how that value compares to the expectations that were set at the start of the relationship. In other words, are you performing below, at, or above expectations?

2. What the future holds for your client. What are the client’s strategic initiatives for the next year?

3. What your company is planning for the year that the client needs to be aware of. This is your chance to share product and service enhancements, expansion plans, or other key initiatives relevant to the client’s relationship with you.

4. The industry in general. This will allow you to showcase your expertise in the client’s business and industry by sharing insights from your unique vantage point. Specifically, what trends do you see coming that the client needs to either leverage or de-risk for?

Business reviews must be attended by your buyer as well as any key stakeholders and project participants. This is also your opportunity to add new relationships by using your ISO Relationship Matrix to identify people you have not met and inviting them to the business review. You will find that it’s easier to both get new contacts to meet with you the first time, and get your clients to refer you internally to other people, when you are requesting they attend a group meeting. Simply put, meeting in a group is less threatening than meeting one-on-one with a salesperson!

Your business reviews should also include key resources from your company. This could be a project lead, an executive, your manager, the head of customer support, or specialists. Whoever you choose, make sure you never outnumber the client! Doing so turns the mood of the business review from a conversation to an inquisition quickly. Plan effectively by knowing who from your client will be attending and then identify the appropriate people from your company based on the agenda and stature of the participants, using a three-to-one ratio. Three of them and one of you.

A typical business review agenda might cover the following topics:

   Review the objectives of the current project and progress to date. Quantify and share success based on the goals set for the project.

   Share wins. Don’t expect that people are sharing good news internally on their own. You must be that conduit of all successes related to your relationships inside the account as these successes will ultimately lead to more projects and/or Leverage (which we will be discussing in the next chapter).

   Address any missteps and the process you used to resolve them. Confirm that everyone is satisfied with the corrections and no lingering issues remain.

   Introduce or reconnect your top managers to the customer.

   Meet and get to know other important customer contacts.

   Discuss industry trends, research and market analysis, and benchmarks that your client might be interested in.

   Set goals for the upcoming year.

Use business reviews consistently, and see the value of your client relationships increase and your ISOs multiply.

 

Having learned in Chapter 9 how to determine which of your existing customers can be most productive for you, in this chapter we explored ways to deepen and enhance your relationships with them—because that is how you will get the most out of the Growth state on your Sales Radar. And that’s really the essence of the discussion in these two chapters. You cannot create a boom by only selling new business each year. Nonstop Sales Booms require a balance: selling both to new clients and growing your existing accounts. In sales, that can be admittedly hard to do; after all, it’s more fun and exciting to bring a new client into the fold than simply nurture long-term relationships with existing clients. Yet, nurturing those relationships and selling more to existing clients is the key to sales efficiency and profitability.

In Part 5 we turn to the final quadrant on your Sales Radar, Leverage. We begin in Chapter 11, with a discussion about Leverage and how a well-managed client will help you grow more easily.