How stable are your customers under your responsibility? How visible are you as a sales manager to these customers, so if your sales rep left suddenly, you would still likely keep their business? Join me as I offer some ideas to help you stabilize and protect your customers…so your team can sell even more!
So how visible are you as the sales manager to your most important customers? Hi, I'm Jim Pancero, helping you become a stronger leader of your sales team. And the reality of today is customers are looking for the support of an entire organization, not just from the sales rep. It used to be 10 years ago the sales rep was usually the only face to the customer, and the only contact, and everything worked fine. But today there's too much turnover, there's too much change in organizations, and organizations are looking for companies to support them, not just an individual sales rep.
So this is a critical time for you as a manager to be visible and to be connected with your customers, and to listen to what they have to say, not just as backup for your sales rep, but back up for any problems your sales rep might be causing. You become the complaint level so instead of just buying from another vendor, they might reach out and actually talk to you, express their concerns, and give you a chance to fix it.
This is a great time for you as a manager to reach out because of the new technology today. See 10 years ago if you would've gone to a customer and said, "Hey, I'd love to Zoom with you and just tell you how important you are to us," there's a good chance that customer would've said, "What are you, too cheap to get on an airplane and come visit me?" But because of COVID everybody has now become adapted to Zoom, and we've seen the value and the benefits of connecting with people, especially senior management, to have brief conversations.
So there's two ways you could do this, the one way is you just have your sales rep take their laptop into the sales call and then bring you up on Zoom and then the three of you have a conversation with the customer, or the other option, I believe just as important, is for you to reach out alone one on one to your major important customers and just ask them, how are we doing as a company? What could we be doing better? How can we provide more value for you, and how can we make this a more unique experience that saves you money? The reality of today is we, as managers, need to be actively involved in our most important accounts, not to sell the customer, but to show the customer the support of the entire organization backed up by the sales rep.
We'd love to know what you're doing about this and how you have brought yourself more into visible perspectives with your customers. I would love to answer your questions of how to achieve that. Thanks for checking out my podcast, I'm posting two new podcasts each week, all aimed at helping you and your team increase your selling competitive advantage. I hope you check them out.
