Good Customer Management Tips

Experienced sales people know that managing existing clients is an extremely important part of their job. The majority of a sales professional’s income comes from his existing clients. That is why it is so important that sales professionals develop effective customer management skills that will help them to retain and grow their customer base.

There is much more to customer management that just making the weekly phone call or stopping in for the occasional appointment. Customer management is hard work that will pay off in increased revenues and expanded opportunities.

Getting to Know the Whole Company

Many inexperienced sales people make the mistake of lavishing all of their attention on their primary customer contact. But what happens if that contact quits or is let go from the company? You may have an idea of who would be next in line to talk to, but your lack of customer management skills could lock you out of your best customer.

The other problem with not being familiar with every important person at your customer location is that you are not involved in the decision making process. If your only contact is the purchasing agent and your method is to wait for the purchase orders, then you will eventually lose that customer.

Spend your time becoming familiar with as many people within your customer’s location as possible. The more friends you make within your client’ location, the better you will be able to recover from sudden personnel changes.

Getting to Know Your Customer’s Business

Your products have value to your customer’s business. If your products did not have value to your clients, then your clients would not be buying your products. But you cannot sit around and wait for your customers to find uses for your products. You need to be proactively working with your customers to find ways in which they can use your products to be more efficient.

A sizeable part of the customer management process is learning how your company can get more involved in what your customers are doing. When you are able to make legitimate suggestions on how your customers can use your products, then you will sell more products.

Stay Proactive With Each New Year

The biggest mistake a sales professional can make is to walk into a customer location every year and just expect his clients to renew their sales or service agreement automatically. When you go into contract renewal meetings, you need to have new products and service suggestions that will benefit your customers. You need to keep your customers on the cutting edge of industry technology and show your customers that you are working hard to keep their business.

If you do not put in the effort to make certain that your customers have the absolute best product and service offering that you can give them, then rest assured that your competition will seize on that opening to take the business from you. When it comes to developing new business and making suggestions on business improvements, you need to treat your existing customers as though they were new customers that had never heard of your company before.