Sales Warning and Opportunity: Are your customers really using your product?
Posted by Geoff Alexander on Mon, Dec 20, 2010 @ 11:15 AM
Upselling and Cross-selling are always topics that generate a lot of activity in my sales training courses. There’s nothing like a delighted customer to help you generate more business in other departments and divisions of the same enterprise, and you can use them for referral selling to new prospects as well.
But what if they aren’t using your product?
If they’re not, you run a real risk of losing the business and strengthening your competition. And bottom line, your company loses revenue and your commission check is lowered.
Sales reps love the hunt and chasing down new business, but unfortunately, tend to neglect the old. Back when I was selling software development tools, my customers always had situations where projects would change, and engineers would come and go. And when they did, my tools would sometimes sit on a shelf, unused. If no one was using them, it scared the daylights out of me, because my customer was losing ROI, and some bright Project Manager just might go hunting for new tools, and not call us.
So here’s what I did, and you should do, too. Whether you sell your product by license, seat, or shrink-wrapped product, make it a point to call your Directors, Managers, and End-users to ensure that they’re using everything of yours that they’ve paid for. Tell them you’re calling to protect their investment by making sure that they’re getting full benefits from what they’ve already paid for. You might find some unused licenses that your prime prospect can train someone to use, and in doing so, pick up additional advocates for your solution.
You’ll also be doing the following:
1) You’ll position yourself as a sales rep that cares about your customers, and is driven to see them succeed.
2) You’ll position your company as one that takes partnerships with customers seriously, and protects their investments.
3) A significant percentage of the time, the conversation will drive you to new opportunities within the corporate umbrella that you never knew existed, and you’ll be able to sell additional solutions, either to that group, or another group within the enterprise. And you’ll have a stellar reference.
Sometimes during the year, you’ve got “dead” times, like the end of a sales year, or when leads are dying up, and you just can’t figure out how to gain new traction. Use these times to call old customers to ensure your product is being used and liked. Fix any customer-related problems that come up. And I’ll be surprised if you don’t turn up some additional business that you never knew existed. So be sure to add calling old customers to your Best Practices Playbook.