Customer Visits Are Key To Keeping Customers

In this audio podcast, we help you develop your program for conducting customer visits. It’s no secret that for most businesses 80% of their sales come from about 20% of their customers. Customer visits keep you close to those customers. Whether you are involved in a short sales cycle process or a complex sale, you need to think about:

How you insure that when they need additional products or services they call you and not the competition.

How do I know what products and services they are looking for?

How you will keep your clients through the length of the contract.

In the sales process we are usually consumed by getting that new sale. This focus sometime allows us to loose focus on the long term effects of an ongoing relationship with the client.

Your Customer Visits Program

Customer visits can be divided into four classes:

Customer Visits by the senior management team. Owners, presidents, general managers, and so on. Customer visits by the sales managers Customer visits by a team of two or more people. Customer visits by an individual. This could be a member of the management team or a sales person.

For any customer visit, the most important reason for visiting your customers is to help you gain a better understanding of:

Your market

The people that buy your products or services

Why they buy

To uncover any concerns they may have that could jeopardize the relationship

Their future needs

How to build a stronger relationships

Steps In Your Customer Visits Program

Step One – Which customers Will You Visit?

For senior management you should look at your top customers. That’s the group of customers that represent 80% of your revenue. For the sales manager, you also want to make sure that you meet with decision makers and influencers. You also want to drill down further into the organization. For the individual sales person. Your objective is always to develop your relationships with in the organization, from the top down. You also want to be looking for opportunities to where your products and services can help them. Step Two – Know What You Expect To Accomplish That means having a plan and an objective. Don’t waist everyone’s time by going through all this without a reason. Step Three – What Is It You Want To Learn From The Customer Visit? Develop a list of questions that you would like to have the customer answer.

Make sure that you are using open-ended question. These are questions that require more that a yes or no answer. You want to discover things about the customer that you didn’t know. Step Four – Communicate With The Customer Prior To The Visit

It’s a good idea to schedule your customer visits in advance. This way you can develop a routing system and reduce travel cost. Start by developing a draft schedule. Then contact the customer and let them know you would like to schedule a time to meet with them. Step Five – Who Will Accompany You On The Customer Visits Now that you have an objective for the meeting. Determine if you will be making the customer visit alone, or will you have someone accompany you on the visit. Step Six – Meet With The Visiting Team Before The Customer Visits This can be one of the areas that causes the biggest disconnect, with multiple participants involved in a customer visits. The lack of coordination. Always meet prior to review the objectives, who you will be meeting with and the roles each participant will play. This should be a formal meeting. Step Seven – Manage the Customer Visit When I say, manage the meeting, I want you to always remember your goals and objectives. Follow your agenda, ask open-ended questions, and make sure that you allow the customer to do most of the talking. Step Eight – Debrief After the meeting, take time to review what happened. What new information was learned? Did you accomplish your goals and objectives. What was the biggest eye opener? Step Nine – Customer Followup Follow up cover two areas. Follow up with the client and followup for your organization. As for the client, send them a written thank you note for taking the time to meet with you and your team. In review Customer visits can be your number one tool for developing lasting relationship with your customers. Customer visits help fending off problems before they occur and position you to uncover opportunities that you may have never known about otherwise. Also look to identify trend in the market place. If a number of your customer visits unearth the same concern. This may be an area that you need to focus in on. While senior management wants to focus on your major customers. They should also include a couple of visits to mid level customers with the potential to become major customers. Always be looking to the future.

I hope this episode, on sales reporting, helps in your sales management career.