Anxiety causes a person or company to withdraw—and promotion is an organization’s way of reaching out, which is the opposite of withdrawing. Not only will you feel better, but once you have really been promoting, you will begin to start seeing leads once again, and having opportunities roll in the door.
The next thing your company should do is refocus its sales team—and that is exactly what we advised and detailed in our second blog.
Our third blog covered the fact that once the team is refocused, you need to deliver your product and service, and you need to deliver it better than you ever have before.
Now we come to the fourth step. What do you end up with if you perform all three of the previous steps in an outstanding manner?
First, you will end up with a highly valuable commodity: repeat business.
In sales it is well-known that it is far easier, and more cost-effective, to sell to an existing customer than a new prospect. The better you service that existing prospect (as we described in our last blog) the easier they will be to sell to, and the more frequently they will return to buy more of your products and services.
Second, you will end up with the most valuable type of lead you can get: referrals.
The better your service, the more referrals you will receive, as very happy customers can’t help but talk up your company and products. A referral is someone who comes to you with an existing appreciation for your products and services, having already been partially sold by a friend or associate.
One important point we should mention is that it is not only great service, to begin with, but continuing great service, that will bring you to repeat business and referrals. This, it will be found, is up to your delivery team, and how well a customer is transitioned to the delivery team once a sale is closed.
As covered elsewhere in detail, if this transition does not happen smoothly, that customer is going to bounce back to the salesperson who closed the sale. The salesperson, who is working hard to sell to new prospects, not only does not have the time to deal with the extra traffic but is not equipped to fully service the customer.
The end result is that the customer, not fully serviced, will no longer be happy. There goes your repeat business and your source of referrals.
In this uncertain business climate, it is especially important that your company get repeat business and referrals generated from top-notch services. Strictly relying on the pursuit of new prospects is not only expensive, but the number of prospects you get solely from a new business will in all probability be insufficient to sustain you through today’s up-and-down times.
For your company to remain healthy, there should be three different channels of potential prospects coming in:
1. Leads and reaches flowing in from marketing efforts.
2. Referrals from happy customers.
3. Those happy customers continuing to buy more products and services.
Make sure you are energetically pursuing all three, and you cannot go wrong.
