Maximising Sales During a Downturn 3: The Client

As a general principle, a key element to surviving a recession is maximising the efficiency of all your resources.

In the context of a salesperson, the only resources you have are you and your clients.

During these times it becomes more important than ever to focus on maintaining good relationships with your current clients.

Your existing customer base becomes a more crucial resource in a tight economy, because they are both a secure source of income and an effective target for developing new sales opportunities.

During a downturn, customer satisfaction becomes crucial. You can not afford to lose any of your current customers when the economy makes it more difficult to close new leads.

Many salespeople make the mistake of putting too much effort toward prospecting new clients, and neglect their relationships with current clients.

There is a point where putting any more effort toward selling new clients will cause you to neglect your current clients and risk losing their business. If you reach this point, then are hurting yourself in the long-run.

A good way to visualize the balance between customer retention and customer acquisition is through the example of a circus performer trying to spin plates.

When the man gets the first few plates spinning, he proceeds to start spinning others with the goal of keeping as many plates as possible spinning at once.

If his efforts toward spinning new plates mean that the first ones stop, then his efforts are wasted.

Since this amount is a judgment call and will vary from person to person and market to market, the best practice is to …

Place customer satisfaction as the priority!

 This means putting extra emphasis on following up with your active, dormant, and past customers.

The smartest way to foster new leads during down times is first through your current and past clients. This ensures that your customer satisfaction remains high, so you will prevent the risk of losing your source of income all together.

There are many ways to develop new leads and opportunities through your current customer base. 

We have created a simple method for discovering areas where you are

over-looking potential sales to your existing customers.

This method is a form of gap analysis that describes your current situation in a product/customer matrix.

This product/customer matrix should be combined with good CRM data to identify the customers who provide the best opportunity for new sales.

 After creating a list of clients and their corresponding sales gaps, you want to prioritise them by the most cost effective to pursue.

The key factor here is to determine which customers are the most likely to be price-sensitive. Those whose businesses and industries are generally more price sensitive will be harder to close, as they are less likely to have available funds in the current market.

Therefore, the customers that should be prioritised are those with gaps in the product/customer matrix and are less price-sensitive.