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Priority Number One - Retain Your Customers

Written by Colleen Edwards

As a sales executive, you continually balance two priorities:

1) Serving and maintaining your core revenue base.

2) Driving incremental top line growth.

In healthy economies, your focus is often on that all-important top line growth. During a recession, protecting your core revenue base, the lifeblood of your business, must become your critical priority. Because if that revenue stream that funds basic operations gets too anemic, the consequences to the company could be catastrophic. Every employee in your organization is relying on the sales team to do everything in its power to keep the revenue flowing and the company healthy.

Retaining Your Customers is Priority One

Like it or not, our world has changed. Hopefully, you've already faced this brutal reality and hit it head on by taking productive action. If you haven't, make a decision today to move beyond the initial shock and the "wait and see" mentality. It's no secret that enterprises are laying off thousands and searching for ways to cut costs in every remote corner of the organization. Billions of dollars of products and services that aren't considered mission critical have already been slashed with the wave of a pen, and more expense cuts are forthcoming. I'm an optimist by nature, and you may be, too, but hope and positive thinking alone won't keep anyone out of the casualty heap in this environment.

Now is the time to take serious action. It doesn't take long to put a well-planned and well-executed customer preservation program in place. Here's PowerMark's five-step process for a direct or channel sales environment:

Step 1: Segment your existing customers.

a. Rank order your customers in terms of revenue contribution, highest to lowest.
b. Put the top 20% in category A, 21-75% in category B, and the bottom 76-100% in category C.

Step 2: Understand and document your current outreach.

a. What are your customer "touch points?" Are they receiving daily, weekly, quarterly or just spotty personal contact?
b. What percent of the revenue provided by your A customers are you reinvesting in showing them you care? What about B?

Step 3: Evaluate your outreach effectiveness.

a. Put on your customer's skin - do you feel cared for by the outreach documented in item 2 above?
b. Do you want your A customers to receive any more care and attention than your C customers?
c. Is a mass blast of the company e-newsletter enough to show your A customers you really care about them as a person and value them as a client?
d. Give it a letter grade by category.

Step 4: Determine the optimal level of outreach.

a. Decide the frequency, type of impact of touch points you want for each customer category.
b. Determine what percentage of revenue you're willing to reinvest to show each category of customer that you truly care.

Step 5: Develop your customer preservation program and execute your plan (walk your talk!)

a. Design an outreach program/calendar that integrates direct sales touch points with high impact marketing touch points.Touchpoints can include birthday cards/calls, special 3-dimensional mailings with customized gift and message, home-baked goods when a deal is renewed, etc.)
b. Execute the program with a maniacal attention to detail.
c. If you don't have internal resources who have bandwidth or the right expertise, outsource it - it's too important and quality execution is critical.

Before you move onto something else today, grab your sales operations and marketing partners, head to a conference room, and use the matrix below to complete this important assessment in about an hour. It's one of the best time investments you'll make this quarter.

This simple process will help put your finger squarely on the pulse of your highest-value customers while they're still customers. Commodity products and services are easy to cut or substitute with a lower cost alternatives. Trusted and valued relationships take time to establish and are much harder to replace. Make sure you're operating in the latter category with your customers who contribute significantly to your core revenue. When you do, you will:

·             Enhance customer loyalty
·             Preserve core revenue
·             Ease account penetration
·             Promote customer referrals
·             Differentiate you/your company from competitors
·             Be doing the right thing

These dismal economic conditions won't last forever. By putting the right programs in place to weather this storm, you will not only help preserve core revenue, but you will be even better positioned to grow your business when the skies clear and the sun shines warmly again. Your customers will know you care, they will have seen you walk your talk when times were tough, and they will stand by you through future good times and bad. Let's get to work.

Colleen Edwards, is president of PowerMark, a premier Southern California marketing firm that has partnered with global sales organizations to implement highly effective customer programs and campaigns. In response to economic priorities, the company recently launched an exclusive service offering called PowerTouch Campaigns, designed to help preserve an enterprise's core revenue through customer care. PowerMark clients include global leaders such as IBM and Symantec and emerging stars like BasePoint Analytics, iinnLight, and Cardiogenesis.