Salespeople who stay focused on the needs of existing customers are less likely to be unseated by price-cutting competitors. They are also more likely to be rewarded with increased loyalty and repeat sales.

Here are five strategies that generate loyalty among existing customers:

1. Be bold. Increase your success in retaining current customers by focusing your efforts on calling customers with innovative and unique ideas to improve their situations. Today’s buyers are so busy dealing with their own competitive pressures that they don’t have time to discuss the same old ideas they’ve heard before. Have you learned anything from your past customers that can relieve your present customers’ pains? Packaging these insights creatively is the key to increasing business.
2. Be a true consultant for your customer. Talk business strategy with your customers. Show how your offerings advance their strategies. Create solutions that solve your customers’ problems. Customers expect solutions that support and drive their central business strategies.
3. Talk results with customers. Show how your product or service can positively affect a customer’s performance. Identify the appropriate needs and create a compelling case for your solution.
4. Be innovative. Increase your credibility as a trusted advisor by bringing to the table innovative, highly differentiated solutions that respond to customers’ unique business challenges.
5. Do your homework. Focus on both results and the relationship. New conditions demand new strategies. Know more and turn that knowledge into value. Customers want insight. Go beyond asking good questions about customers’ situations. Before getting in front of existing customers, know the ins and outs of their own customers, competitors, strengths and weaknesses.

Discussion ideas

• Ask your salespeople to give examples of how thinking outside the box helped them increase sales to existing customers.
• Ask for specific examples of how they fill the role of business consultants for customers.

Resist the pressure to just sell something

Overpromising to customers is a trap that’s easy for some salespeople to fall into when they’re trying to increase sales. It creates havoc downstream by eroding customer trust, losing business and jeopardizing entire relationships.

Here are three techniques that will help salespeople build stronger relationships with existing customers.

1. Focus on results. Show your commitment to constantly adding value. Conduct periodic account reviews that summarize the value you’re providing customers with and pinpoint areas for improvement.
2. Be an educator. Your customers have never been more vulnerable than right now. Help them develop strategies for dealing with their competitors. Be proactive in providing advice and insight.
3. View each customer’s industry as a potential new market. Focus efforts on capturing market share within the industry. Use your success with one customer in the industry to build more relationships within that same industry.

Discussion ideas

• Ask your salespeople for examples of how value-added selling enabled them to increase sales to present customers.
• Ask for examples of how competitive research helped your salespeople increase sales to present customers.

Tags: 20 Minute Sales Meeting, increasing sales to existing customers, loyalty, repeat sales, Trust, Value, value added