When it comes to boosting sales and revenue, most companies automatically think about lead generation campaigns and turning new prospects into paying customers. But not enough companies think about selling more products to the customers they already have. This is a shame as a company’s existing accounts are usually its quickest route to business gains.
In this article, we’ll discuss why your company should focus on its current customers and six tips you can use to sell to them more effectively. Let’s get started!
Why Focus on Your Current Customers?
Wouldn’t it make more sense to find and secure new customers, rather than simply tend to old ones? We understand your reasoning. You want to grow your company. Focusing on your current clients seems more like a holding pattern than a launch initiative.
But, as it turns out, concentrating on the customers you already have has three amazing benefits:
It Takes Less Effort
While selling to existing customers isn’t necessarily easy, you do have one distinct advantage: you’ve already developed a relationship with these folks. They trust you and they know your products will do exactly what you claim they will. This is huge!
Without this level of trust, you have a slim, 13% chance of making a sale, which means it’s much more difficult to sell to brand new customers than current ones.
It’s Less Expensive
Selling to your current customers is also much less expensive than selling to brand new prospects. For one thing, they already trust you and your company, as we mentioned above, which means your conversion rate in these selling scenarios will be much higher.
You also won’t have to spend as much capital “getting your foot in the door,” so to speak. The time and energy it takes to acquire contact information, arrange meetings, and prepare long sales presentations can be funneled towards other pursuits because of the trust and goodwill you’ve already built up with each of your current clients.
All in all, it will cost your organization 16 times more to build a long-term relationship with a new prospect than it will to simply maintain an existing customer.
You’ll Make More Money
Lastly, selling to existing accounts will result in more profits. How much more? According to Bain & Company, repeat customers will spend up to 67% more in months 31 – 60 than they do in months 0 – 6, depending on the industry you sell in.
RJMetrics confirms these findings with their own. The popular blog found that repeat customers spend 300% more than brand new buyers!
How to Sell More to Existing Accounts
Now that we know why selling to existing accounts is so valuable, let’s talk about how to do it.
Here are six tips to help you take full advantage (in a good way!) of your current clients and boost revenue for your company to new heights:
1. Know Your Customers
The first step is to really know your customers. It doesn’t make much sense to pitch your company’s products to organizations who don’t need them. Clients who are notoriously tightfisted or hesitant to try new things probably aren’t the best fits either.
It’s your job to determine which of your current customers are most likely to purchase additional products from you, then approach them with some kind of sales presentation.
When you know the people you’re trying to sell to, you’ll be able to think proactively and show them products that will help them achieve their goals in a timely manner. But If you don’t don’t take time to understand their objectives, you won’t be able to present the right products at the right times and your sales numbers will suffer as a result.
Action Item: Take time to get to know your current customers and the things they want to accomplish. Then present them with products that will help them do so.
2. Understand Your Entire Product Line
In order to think proactively and showcase the products that will help your current customers achieve their goals, you have to have a solid understanding of your entire product line.
If you don’t know your company’s offerings like the back of your hand, how will you be able to suggest the right new products for your clients to buy?
The answer is, you won’t be able to.
This is really easy to do if you only sell a handful of products. But for organizations with large product lines, it will take effort and dedication. It will be worth it, though!
Action Item: Study all of your company’s products until you know and understand them on a deep level. This is the only way that you’ll be able to pitch the right solutions to your current clients and maintain the high level of trust you currently have with them.
3. Develop an Account Growth Strategy
When you know your customers and your products, you can combine your knowledge and develop an account growth strategy, which is a fancy way of saying, “I think Product X will help Company Y accomplish Task Z.” In other words, you’ll be able to handpick specific products for specific clients and design personalized presentations for each.
This is important! You’ll experience much more success when you properly match clients to products, then present said products in a persuasive way that helps illuminate the specific benefits each individual customer will experience. Make sense?
Action Item: Always think in terms of value. Ask yourself how your company can benefit each of its current customers in new ways. Then develop a plan to make it happen.
4. Invest in the Right Tools
You could attempt to sell more products to your current customers the old fashioned way: with nothing but a good plan and a strong work ethic. But there are so many amazing technological solutions available to you. Why wouldn’t you use a few of them? Here are a few apps we’d recommend investing in to help increase your productivity and success rate:
CRM Software: A quality customer relationship management tool will give you a bird’s eye view of all of your company’s current customers. It will also allow you to “zoom in” and see when each of them became clients, what products they’ve already invested in, and the last time you spoke to them.
You can then use this information to craft a sales presentation that has a high likelihood of earning a sale.
Calendar Tool: As the leader of an outside sales team, you understand the importance of a top-notch calendar tool. Without one, it’s easy to miss appointments, which almost always leads to damaged relationships and lost revenue.
It’s important to keep your meetings with current clients too. That’s why we suggest investing in a calendar app that allows for easy appointment setting and seamless integration with Google or Outlook.
E-Contract App: It’s not official until your customer signs on the dotted line. Don’t let all your hard work go to waste by not getting the signature and allowing your customer to back out before they’ve actually purchased the product you’re trying to sell them.
Invest in an e-contract app that enables electronic contract signing and close deals on the spot.
The SPOTIO Solution: You could invest in stand-alone CRM, Calendar, and E-Contract software. Or you could choose SPOTIO, which will give you access to all three tools (and more) for one low monthly price.
The best part? Our application is specifically designed to assist outside sales teams, which means it features are tailor-made for you and your team’s exact situation. Request a demo today to see how SPOTIO can help you sell more — both to new prospects and existing accounts.
Action Item: While none of the software tools above are absolutely necessary, they will undoubtedly help you boost your team’s productivity and sell more to existing accounts. Investigate them further and choose an application or two (or three or four!) that fits your needs.
5. Put in the Time and Effort
To effectively sell to existing accounts, you need to craft a foolproof plan, based on your in-depth knowledge of your current customers and the various products you sell. But these things, in and of themselves, won’t automatically guarantee you more sales.
You also have to put in the time and effort to make it happen. If you don’t, one of your competitors will swoop in and do it for you. Definitely not what you want!
So do the hard work of implementing your plan. Swing by your customer’s place of business, pick up the phone and engage them in conversation, or log into your email and craft a message that informs them of the new product you’re selling and why it would be beneficial to them.
Once you find a series of actions that works for you, systemize it. That way you can do the same thing over and over again for each of your clients. You may even be able to automate certain steps of your system if you really try! Doing so will help your productivity skyrocket and allow you to boost sales faster than you ever thought possible.
Action Item: Commit to doing the work. Put your plan into action, reach out to your existing accounts with value, then turn the entire process into a repeatable system.
6. Analyze Your Successes and Failures
Last, but certainly not least, you need to analyze your attempts to sell to existing accounts and strategize ways to improve your approach. After each pitch, ask yourself questions like:
- “Do we understand what our clients are trying to achieve?”
- “Did we match the right product to the right client?”
- “Was our growth strategy on point?”
It’s important to ask these questions, and those like them, after both successes and failures. By analyzing successful deals, you’ll learn what works.
Taking a closer look at failures in this department will show you what doesn’t. You can then use both inputs of information to improve the way you approach and sell to existing accounts in the future.
Action Item: Always conduct a “post-mortem” after every sales presentation. Learn what you did right and what you did wrong. Then adjust your strategy for next time.
Best Practices to Keep in Mind
You now know our top tips in regards to selling more to existing accounts. But before we let you go, we want to share two best practices to help your organization improve its ability to sell to its current client base. They are:
Train Your Frontline Employees
Your sales reps aren’t the only ones who interact with customers on a regular basis. In fact, depending on the kind of business you own and/or manage, your salespeople might have less contact with them than other team members.
For example, frontline staff such as customer service representatives engage with current customers on a daily basis. By training them to recognize when a specific client might be a good fit for a new product, and asking them to pass this information along to your sales team, you’ll ensure your top sellers always have the information they need to sell more to existing accounts.
Reward Your Existing Accounts
You should also consider rewarding your current customers in some way for their loyalty to your company. A 20% discount, for instance, given to current customers only, might entice a few existing accounts to bite the bullet and purchase another product from your business.
This strategy will boost sales now and in the future. When clients are shown preferential treatment, they tend to stick around and continue buying.
Wrapping Up
By focusing on your existing accounts, you’ll be able to save money and boost revenue — without expending nearly as much effort as you would if you were to focus solely on converting new prospects into paying customers. All you have to do to sell more to your current clients is follow the six tips we outline in this article:
- Know Your Customers
- Understand Your Entire Product Line
- Develop and Account Growth Strategy
- Invest in the Right Tools
- Put in the Time and Effort
- Analyze Your Successes and Failures
If you implement these six tips (and the two best practices we shared as well), you’ll see much more success when selling to your existing accounts.
Good luck!
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SPOTIO is the #1 field sales acceleration and performance management software that will increase revenue, maximize profitability, and boost sales productivity.
Want to see a product demonstration? Click here to see how SPOTIO can take your sales game to the next level.
