When Sales Is the Power Core

Power Core Series – 3 of 6

When sales is the power core, the sales force is a well-oiled machine that knows how to target and close customers.

Areas of Strength

Your sales organization has a perfected ability to position your product with differentiation that causes people to want to have it:

• You are tearing up the market. Through all channels, the prize is getting new customers in the door.
• New customers respond to your offers.
• You have a way of positioning your product in just the right way to close that sale.
• Metrics are a strong behavioral management tool that people know how to work within. Sales clearly understand the metrics and knows the consequences for meeting or not meeting the goals

Great sales organizations have perfected the way to get customer feedback efficiently into the pipeline and know how to turn it into actionable steps.

Customer Vulnerability and Hot Spots

The connectivity between the sale and the overall customer experience can be your Achilles’ heel.

• What is the process to ensure that customers receive the information they need for the optimum use and operation of the product?
• If there are questions between the closing of the sale and the receipt of the product, to whom do they turn?
• What are the linkages between the sales department and the other parts of the organization to ensure that a smooth transi- tion occurs as someone moves from prospect to customer?
• How do you foster a long-term relationship with customers who have been in the system for a while?
• Does the sales team consider it their job to resell the company and products when subscriptions, services, and products are up for renewal?
• Are they rewarded as heavily for continuing sources of revenue as bringing in a new source?

The metrics that people are conditioned to perform tend to be short term and offer immediate gratification. It will be a challenge to get used to a new world where the work will pay off not in months but sometimes in years.

Kick Start for Integrating the Customer into the Sales Power Core

1. Commit to focus on customer retention, not just acquisition.

2. Establish a defector pipeline.

3. Commit to no more than five new actions to manage retention.

4. Begin to track and manage retention performance.

5. Introduce guerrilla metrics.