With the threat of downsizing looming around the heads of employees in any basic firm, the whole concept of ‘working smarter’ has become the lifeblood and sustenance of employees in a work place, given the demand of efficiency despite the sparse budget and abysmal headcount.

What are the best tips for Accelerating Sales

There are some ways in which you can efficiently cause accelerating sales which benefit your company and its employees. These include Customer Advisory Boards or Councils and Executive Summits

Customer Advisory Boards (CAB) or Counciils (CAC)

A Customer Advisory Board is a high-return, high-profile event that can heavily influence your company's competitive standing. A successful CAB provides a powerful format that turns customers into true advocates and provides executives with the information needed to align customer programs with company strategy. A formal Customer Advisory Board should be in your marketing and strategic arsenal.

Executive Summits

Executive Summits are one-time centralized or regional events – that bring key decision-makers together to preview a strategy, product or market innovation. Through these focused exchanges, customers become first-to-know, first-to-buy and first to advocate your solution in the marketplace.

The entire process of gauging customer satisfaction, and improving and leveraging it is a daunting one for businesses and may seem too tedious to accomplish. However, the benefits offered by leveraged customers are countless and businesses simply cannot afford to overlook them. Therefore, when setting out to leverage customer satisfaction, the first most-important step is to ask the customer certain well-directed questions:

• “What is it about our business that appeals to you?” or
• “Would you recommend us to others? Why?”

The answers to such questions, which should generally be either positive or negative, help businesses identify their own strengths and weaknesses. This way, the business ensures that its customers actively participate in its overall wellbeing, and contribute towards its success. Leveraging customer relationships usually involves the following important considerations:

Being open to complements as well as criticism – Regardless of the nature of a business or the industry it operates in, the feedback and opinion of customers is crucial to their long-term success. Customers can provide businesses with first-hand knowledge of the inherent defects in a product service, allowing timely revisions. Therefore, businesses need to actively engage themselves in listening to what the customer has to say to them.

Encourage conversations – Quite understandably, customers would barely be expected to take out time to visit the business with complaints and feedback. It is therefore the duty of the business to pursue customers and engage them in conversations so that their valuable input can be acquired. This also helps them build healthy long-term relationships for the future.

Reciprocate – When leveraging customer relationships, it is as important to reciprocate the goodwill of customers. Hence, businesses can reward their customers with incentives, gifts and monetary benefits as a sign of appreciation for how much they are valued by customers. Moreover, gifts can also work to retain the interest of unhappy clients in the business, even though for a short time.

Maintain contact – When a channel of healthy communication has been established with a customer, essential contact details may be requested of them to ensure that the business has the chance to get back to them with positive outcomes and makeovers. The one thing that a customer appreciates most about a business is that they listen to them and act!

See Opportunity – In this age of industrialization where business growth is restricted by competitive market pricing and widespread product distribution, customers can become the most valuable strategic advantage for businesses. Establishing positive customer relationships can become one of the hallmarks of a business in the market, which in turn helps the business attract more customers.

I was recently challenged an interesting way to think about B2B customer segmentation to drive profitability and growth.  Many people are familiar with the Growth Market Matrix (Cash Cow, Dogs, Stars and ???) that Bruce Henderson developed at BCG.   I decided to take this thought process a step further and apply the principles to customer segmentation in the B2B world.  It’s worked quite nicely with a few clients to determine where to focus energies that will lead to growth and profitability.

The premise behind the growth matrix is that every business can be placed in to a quadrant to effectively manage a portfolio of businesses.  Similarly, for B2B strategies, B2B customers can be placed in to similar quadrants to determine the level of sales, marketing and development investment with the top accounts to deliver growth and profitability.  Here’s my take at the customer segmentation side.

Invest in the Stars For B2B companies, identifying customers that have huge market growth potentials where you have a dominant share of business with them today are perfect accounts for growth and profitability.  As these companies add resources, make acquisitions and organically grow their businesses, opportunities will abound to grow your revenues with customers like this.  These accounts have more of your products/solutions to purchase, offer other parts of their organization to penetrate, and provide many opportunities to build relationships and prove your value.   What is even better is that the marquee “star” accounts will have incredible growth stories that you can leverage to help you sell the next set of “star” accounts.  These are the places to spend your time, invest in the relationships and over deliver with every opportunity you have to ultimately drive revenue growth and profitability.

Protect the Cash Cow These are the customers that are in mature markets and have revenue growth leveling off and buy most everything you have today.  They’ve been with you for a long-time and are typically highly profitable since you mutually understand value delivered and have created efficiencies working together – but they will be cost conscious and continually expect you to deliver more with each new order or renewal.  The opportunity is to focus on account retention by delivering new ideas that drive efficiencies in the way you work together.  Often marquee customers are included in this group that provide an organization with clout and credibility and are advocates to help an organization acquire more customers.  With the cash cow accounts, focus on the top revenue accounts and make sure you don’t lose them.

Walk the Dogs This is an area I find most companies waste valuable resources and have the biggest challenge in determining what to do.  They are the accounts that are small, have limited capacity to grow, milk you for every dime, complain about everything you do for them, aren’t very profitable, and suck the life out of your resources.  Realizing these customers aren’t going to improve or align with your plans for growth and profitability is the first step in deciding what to do with these accounts.   I encourage companies to think about divesting of these customers, or at a minimum, place them in maintenance mode and consider them to be a “wind-down” business.

Acquire the Sweet Spot Question Marks The questionable accounts are those that don’t know much about your company and/or purchase very little from you today.  Smaller accounts can be a waste of time and resources, but those that are of the right size and in markets where you have a strong value proposition represent the greatest opportunities for acquisition growth.  My recommendation is to use a dual approach to these accounts.  A top down approach with your executive team to connect with the highest level decision maker possible, and a bottoms-up approach with your sales team to increase your growth prospects with these accounts.

Leverage this strategy to drive growth with your top accounts!

Have you given your Advisory Council member roster a good, long look recently?  I am not talking about just looking at the number of members, but really analyzing the level of engagement from each member.  There is absolutely nothing wrong with realizing there are members on your Advisory Council who may have passed their prime or just no longer fit your Council's profile.  As such, it is important to review membership engagement on an annual basis.  These are just a few areas I recommend you consider when reviewing the level of engagement from each Advisory Council member:

1. Attendance and level of participation in Advisory Council functions, such as regular Council meetings and interim conference calls.
2. Willingness to be an advocate for your company or provide a referral.
3. The member continues to provide a perspective relevant to the strategic direction of your company.

In order to drive sustainable, predictable, and profitable growth, you must gain the level of insight only fully engaged customer decision makers can offer. Ensure your Advisory Council is providing that direction by evaluating each member's level of engagement.

Rob Urbanowicz, Principal at Geehan Group wil be presenting at the CFG October Round Table in San Francisco October 11-13, 2011.

Session Outline:
The expanding role of the B2B chief marketer requires a rare skill and level of business savvy that is far beyond the messaging and creativity of a brand marketer in the B2C space.  Advancing the role of the B2B marketer to a strategist, innovation catalyst, growth generator, customer loyalty advocate and business partner is the new norm.

We will explore how B2B companies are rebalancing marketing budgets and focusing on the programs and relationships that propel organizations to develop executable growth strategies.  Participants will share perspectives regarding their challenges in executing customer engagement programs that drive strategic value.  Sharing real situations, Rob Urbanowicz will speak to the examples and approaches where “Top Customer” programs have advanced organizations to:

• Engage your most valuable customers in highly relevant and meaningful ways to capture market insight, align your senior executives and deliver a market driven strategy
• Differentiate you from other providers while systematically building deeper relationships and account penetration
  

For more information regarding this event please contact: meetings@cfgglobal.com