Creating Good Customers For Life

How does the future look for growing your sales volume? Are you chasing the best value customers? Do you look for the “easy win” and move on? Or do you create customers for life?

Grow Sales Volume Intentionally

Great salespeople look for new customers having characteristics similar to their best customers. The goal is to develop mutually beneficial long-term relationships and create customers for life. Even if you are in a “one call close” business, the best prospects have needs and resources to meet the needs similar to your best customers. And, in my experience, there are very few “one-and-done” transactions for professional salespeople. Customers may make large purchases like homes and cars infrequently but they will buy again. In the meantime they have friends, family and colleagues who can be referred to the great salespeople.

First Define Your Best Value Customer

Begin with the end in mind. Good advice whatever you are planning. For the professional salesperson looking to grow their sales volume, knowing which prospects can become customers for life is critical. In another post we discussed how to define your best customers. When you look at them, they all have similar characteristics like size, business model, industry, location, product life cycle, etc. You may have different defining characteristics for the A list customers if you sell into different markets. Great salespeople know that prospecting with companies with characteristics similar to their best customers is the most efficient way to create new customers for life.

Second Prepare The Value Added Proposition

Great salespeople have built mutually beneficial long-term relationships with their best customers by adding value to the customers business. They do it by providing products and services making their customers more efficient and more profitable. Think about which problems you solve for your best customers. Create stories of how those companies have benefitted from doing business with you. Begin creating new customers for life by meeting with prospects who have similar problems to your A list. Great salespeople then qualify the buyers offering a value added proposition and listening to the buyer’s response.

Third Build A Strong Relationship

Buyers who come to trust and respect you will ultimately become customers for life. Great salespeople build relationships one interaction at a time. Trust and respect are built on honesty and keeping the best interest of the customer in mind. When I sold for a metal fabricator, customers offered me work we could certainly do. But sometimes the customer would be better served by using one of our competitors. When that happened I recommended the customer use a competitor. But when the customer needed something very unique, was on a tight schedule, or demanded very high quality, we would be awarded the work. Great salespeople know their customer’s business well enough to be a valuable resource.

What You Can Do Right Now

• List the characteristic defining your best customers for life
• Select prospects with similar characteristics
• Write compelling value proposition to solve problems common to your target market
• Meet with potential customers and begin building mutually beneficial long-term relationships

To learn more sales secrets see Chapter Twenty-Two, Customer Management, in Secrets of the Softer Side of Selling. For even more sales help, join our FREE Sales Club! “See” you next week.

Good selling!
Don Crawford & Lois Carter Crawford