Are You Really Making The Most Of Your Most Important Accounts?
A vitally important sales activity is that of managing existing customer accounts to consolidate and grow the relationship. Yet unfortunately, when compared over time, the customers’ interest levels increase while salespeople’s interest levels tend to decrease – This creates a “relationship gap” and is due entirely to complacency.
Another major issue is that, too often, the salesperson fails to expand his “contact base” – as this next survey proves – which results in vulnerability and exposure to competitive activity.
Periodically, the Financial Times conducts a survey of British industry to establish how companies go about their purchasing. The survey is very comprehensive, broken down into many kinds of products and services.
From a Sales Director’s perspective, these are very worrying statistics…
Customer size (Number of employees): Less than 200
Average number of buying influencers: 3.43
Number of influencers visited by salespeople: 1.72
Customer size (Number of employees): 200 – 400
Average number of buying influencers: 4.85
Number of influencers visited by salespeople: 1.75
Customer size (Number of employees): 401 – 1000
Average number of buying influencers: 5.81
Number of influencers visited by salespeople: 1.90
Customer size (Number of employees): 1001 +
Average number of buying influencers: 6.50
Number of influencers visited by salespeople: 1.65
In essence, without a sustained approach to ongoing servicing and support activities, customers that took months to win are ultimately lost because there was a lack of interest from their supplier.
Today’s clients/customers are looking for vendors who can be business partners, who are willing and able to share risks and who are able to properly manage the entire sales process.
Fact: It now costs fifteen times as much to locate and sell to a new customer
as it does to an existing one.