INNERGISE!

It is an obvious fact that relying on too few customers is a playing a very dangerous game. 

If a significant amount of your total revenue as a business resides with just one or two customers and they suddenly decide to change their suppliers or their needs, then this has the ability to literally kill a business overnight.

A good client spread will minimise any risk associated with losing one or two of your customers which will inevitably happen for one reason or another. Having said that, you need to ensure that the client spread isn’t too big to manage and that can you still maintain the same levels of service with every customer. 

The important thing is to ensure that your business development activities are broken down into three very distinct components – land, secure and expand.

Land

This is all about going out, filling up your sales pipelines and winning new business. This is the time to be asking yourself the following questions to ensure that your sales activity is focused, efficient and effective from the outset:

• How many actual sales do I need to make to achieve / exceed my sales target for the year (you can calculate this by the total revenue target divided by the average value of a deal that you typically make)?
• How many customers do I need to be working with (calculated by the total number of sales you need, as outlined above, divided by the average number of sales you typically make in a year per customer)?
• Who are those customers?
• How much do I know about them?
• What do I not know about them?
• What are their main ‘pain points’ (the key current issues and challenges they have that need resolving)?
• Does my sales pitch target those pain points?
• Do I have good enough relationships with the key decision influencers within that customer?
• Have I demonstrable proof that I can provide them with what they are looking for?

This is just the start, but it will set the playing field for how you will build a targeted new business strategy to win their business. 

It will also clarify for you the exact number of customers you need to work with in order to hit your sales target, many of which will be brand new though some will also come from a blend any dormant customers that you have (ones that have spent money with you in the last three years, but not in the last 12 months) as well as from your existing client base.

This leads us nicely onto the next two areas of business development.

Secure

One of the biggest mistakes that companies do is oversell and under deliver to their customers, and then go back and try and sell them some more. You need to earn the right to go back into one of your customers and up-sell and/or cross-sell to them, and the most obvious way to do this is to over-deliver on what you sold them in the first place and then secure them. Ask yourself this:

• How will our customer be measuring success from this?
• Has what we have delivered to them met their expectations?
• Has it exceeded their expectations?
• If so, how can we demonstrate this back to them and prove this is true?
• Why would they go to another supplier and what can we do to pre-empt this happening?
• How can we lock that customer down so they move away from using multiple suppliers to just us?
• Can we make this a contractual agreement?
• What can we give them to add significant (and unexpected) value to what we have just done?

If we can prove to both ourselves and the customer that they are getting more than they need from you, and we can lock them down with the relationship we have and a contract to back it up, then we can move on to the third and final stage of the process:

Expand

Mapping out the key decision influencers, as you would have done already (see land above), will certainly give you an insight into other areas of the customer’s business that you can target, but now is the time to take this further and create a comprehensive client map to give you a strategy behind what you are doing.

• How much of this customer’s business do we currently have (go and ask them)? 
• Who else within the customer’s business needs to buy from us?
• Are they currently buying from one of your competitors and if so, what is the compelling reason for them to change suppliers?
• Who within their business will act as a mentor for us (someone within the business who fervently wants us to be successful)? 
• What is the incentive for the customer to have more departments buying from you and/or buying more from you themselves (this doesn’t have to be monetary)?

The key here is to identify all the opportunities within that customer, set some very clear targets towards the growth of the account and then create a strategy that builds upon our existing relationship within that customer, our proven expertise at over-delivering (see secure above) and that incentivises the customer to give you more business.

Again, when you look at the numbers of customers you actually need, the levels of business within each of those customers you can get and the highlighted opportunities you have from your client maps, you will find that achieving your sales quota from both new and existing customers is actually fairly simple… as long as you don’t forget to secure them along the journey.