Acquiring Relationships

In previous articles we have looked at pricing and its role in your marketing strategy. We are going to look at creating a sales process that allows you to grow your business with consistency.

At Partnercorp we subscribe to the view that most businesses achieve consistent sales when they focus on client relationships. This entails client relationship generation, development and maintenance.

This means sales emerge from the number and quality of relationships that your organisation has under management.

The key to success lies in continually growing the number of relationships under management as well as having a carefully crafted management process that fosters and develops these relationships.

From where does the opportunity to create relationships come? Relationships come from two sources:-

Using existing clients is fine however your clients are limited in number and therefore restrict the number of new relationships you can expect to develop.

However, the potential to acquire relationships in the open market is limited only by the size of the market.

Whose job is it to identify and develop the market?

In most organisations it is the job of the sales team. This can cause real problems. For example:-

Where possible, getting the saleperson to focus on converting opportunites into sales is a better way to go.

So how do you generate the sales opportunity if the saleperson isn’t doing it?

This is where the development of a sales process comes in.

As the Sales Conveyor diagram illustrates there are three key components in developing and implementing a successful Sales Program.

Most companies maintain a relationship with a client only after their first purchase. By implementing a communications program you can form relationships in advance of the sale. This can mean more sales, sooner.

Getting people onto your communications program can require some lateral thinking. For example, if you sell to businesses consider:-

If you cannot purchase (or otherwise acquire) a list of suitably targeted prospects, you may have to resort to less direct forms of ‘lead-generation’.

Some of these include:-

The goal should be to ensure that you have enough relationships being loaded onto to the conveyor to deliver the volume of sales at the other end that you require.

Many people treat the marketing and sales process as an art form when in fact it is a science. By developing a tight system for acquiring relationships, maintaing relationships and closing sales you will not only maintain your market share, you will grow it.

Think about ways to grow your database, that is, how can you grow the number of potential clients? Next month we will look at strategy for maintaining the relationship and converting them to sales. We will also consider some of the key elements of a successful sales process which include:-

• Focussing on optimising throughout, rather than sales conversions
• Taking the focus off selling.
• Automating your communications program

Would you like to maximise the sales process in your business? Click Here

Part 2 - Maintaining the Relationship