Transcript
Intro:
Hi, everyone. I'm Ben Wright, successful entrepreneur, corporate leader and expert sales coach to some of the most talented people our amazing planet has to offer. You're listening to the Stronger Sales Teams podcast, where we bring together and simplify the complex world of B2B sales management to help the millions of sales managers worldwide build, motivate, and keep together highly effective sales teams…teams who grow revenue and make their businesses actual profits.
Along the journey, we also provide great insights and actionable steps to managing your personal health. A happy and productive you is not only better for your teams, but everyone around you. So if you're an ambitious Sales Leader who wants to build the highest performing and engaged teams, Stronger Sales Teams is right where you need to be.
Ben Wright:
Welcome back to Stronger Sales Teams, the place where we provide real-world and practical advice to help you develop super-powered sales teams. We’re into the new year. Some of us are back at work, some of us are still starting to find our feet under the desks again. And for others, we’re hoping that the endless summer can continue. Or if we’re based in the northern part of the world, that this ski season can be long and plentiful, or any of those winter sports that we love doing can allow us to have lots and lots of fun.
I like to talk about this at this time of the year because we work so hard as sales leaders, we are so focused on wanting to get the best for our team and our people that sometimes we forget about ourselves and it’s absolutely okay to acknowledge that a little bit of downtime is more than okay. And certainly, at the moment we had planned to be enjoying some downtime. So hopefully as this goes to air, where at home or away and are simply enjoying some easier moments in our year before getting back into a really busy 2025.
So, as we ended last year, an area that I had a number of requests from into the business was around how we can get the most out of our existing database of both customers and prospects. And certainly, for each, there are slightly different strategies that we can use to develop better relationships with those who are yet to transact with our business, that is our prospects or those who have transacted before but have not returned to work with the business again. And when we talk about building revenue for businesses way, way back in the podcast series, in fact, all the way back to 2023 and it was episode 19, 20 and 21, which I really encourage you to look at, we spoke about the three fastest ways to grow revenue. One, being new customers. Certainly, the most impactful but also the most expensive. Two being to increase our spend from customers at the time of transaction. A little bit less expensive and a little bit less impactful, but certainly meaningful because they’re there and transacting with us and we have a captive audience at that point in time. And last but not least, how we have customers returning to our business. So repeat customers who come again and again and again, who are by far the cheapest to acquire, but also those that once we have an established business, can be really meaningful and impactful to our brand and our future sales performance.
So, today we’re actually looking a little bit further around how we can have more impact to those customers who have traded with our businesses before. So, if you want to know a little bit more on this, in particular, episode 21 is the area that I would be focusing on. But for today, let’s have a look at how we can increase the transacting rates from customers who have worked with us before, but for whatever reason haven’t continued to do so.
So, I’m going to run through a blueprint here that you might be able to consider for your teams that could be really impactful in encouraging customers who are already on your business database to return and work with you again. So let’s get into it. It’s going to be fast and punchy today because we’ve got a few things to go through, but that’s how we like podcasts and I hope that you get the value from it.
Right? So, number one, we are looking to have customers return to transact with our business. Again, the very first thing we need is data. We need to understand what the number of customers, who they are when they transacted with us, what their profile looks like, and really understand what the opportunity for us could be. So most businesses now, certainly those that have sales teams and sales leaders, there’s not really a reason not to have an effective CRM system, even if it’s just an Excel template. But certainly there are so many out there like Salesforce, like HubSpot, like Pipedrive, like Netsuite, like Zoho, and even those like Team High Level that are allowing you to build your own CRM systems out. So, there are so many out there that are actually allowing us to collect data in a really effective manner that I’m hopeful that those listening actually have access to this data. If you don’t, serious note to make is to make sure that one of your early New Year’s resolutions is to get data into your business as quickly as you can. There are free versions of CRMs out there that you can use to start collecting this information. If you would like some help with it, please get in touch. Because it can be an absolute minefield and one that sales leaders can often put off just because the size and the volume of work needed to get it up and running. But I’m going to assume that you have that CRM system today and you can get some data from there that will give you meaningful information around when customers last transacted with you. The more data you can have in profiling what they bought, how they spent their money, the type of products they used, how their experience was, geographic profiles, et cetera, the better. But let’s get that data out into Excel. That’s number one. Get the data that gives us something to play with in terms of our existing customer database.
Number two is to start to segregate these customers into periods when they last transacted with us. If for a business that trades regularly, you might have less than 30 days or less than one month, one to two months, and then perhaps greater than two months. For a longer stage business, it might be in the last year, last one to two years or two years plus, find that timeframe that is most appropriate for your business and how often you expect a customer to be transacting. And then from there you can start to work that against the data.
So, let’s dive into a little bit further. We’ve got the data and we’ve classified our customers into when they last transacted. The next piece here is to start to break that data down into some of the reasons why customers aren’t transacting with us. These could be anything from they are likely to only be a one transaction type of customer, I.e. they bought a house from us if we’re a real estate agent and you know that they were downsizing. And from there it’s unlikely they’re going to be buying more properties. Or they could be a customer who bought a piece of material from us that’s only a caravan, that’s going to last 10 years and they’re unlikely to trade up again, for example. Now, you’d probably argue there’s holes in that example because certainly once you have a caravan, you know, you get the itch and you want, you want to upgrade. But certainly, there are pieces of equipment that are very unlikely to be upgraded again for a long period of time. However, our business may have ancillary services that we can offer to them, so we need to keep that in mind. But for the most part what we want to understand is the type of profile our customers when they last transacted with us. Right. And why you think they’re not transacting again. Is it because they’re a once only great, we carve them out? Is it because they had a bad experience? Is it because we haven’t provided enough training to them? Is it because they’ve gone with a competitor product? Right. Really start to understand what those reasons are as to why customers haven’t transacted with us and try and group them into buckets, four to six, even eight if you need to. Buckets as to reasons as why customers aren’t transacting with us. So then we have a broad spectrum of data, some information around when they last transacted with us, but also some of the reasons why we think they haven’t transacted. Again, what this does is give us a level of knowledge that we can then go and provide some offers against. I.e. we know some facts that we can do something about. Now, if we’re uncertain as to how we’re going to determine why customers aren’t transacting with us at the moment, by all means get out and survey them. It might be a manual process, it might be something we can do at an automatic level, might be able to get surveys out, we might be able to poll those around the business. But certainly, we need to make sure we’re really understanding the reasons why customers aren’t transacting with us. So that will allow us to build some offers out for them.
Okay, so we’ve got the data, we’ve understood when they last transacted with us and the reasons why we think they aren’t transacting with us. Again from here, what I’d really encourage you to start to think about is a playbook of offers that we can use to bring customers back to our business. This could be anything from a promotional offer. Yes, pricing offers are okay to bring people back into our business. It’s certainly it’s often better than nothing. But they are not the be-all and end-all. And I really encourage teams to have far more up their sleeves than just price because the value equation is often far broader than that. So, what could they include? They could include things like a training program. They could include things like offers that are non-monetary, extended warranties, servicing offers, offers to provide extra value to the product they have. If they have that caravan, some additional equipment or add-ons or features that they might like in that caravan, some solar, some battery storage. Right. Whatever it may be it could be rebuilding relationships as part of your playbook. That is we’re reaching out and just understanding how they’re going. It could be knowledge sharing. So, it’s not training on how to use your product or service. It could be training on how they could get their role. Particularly in a B2B business where you’re providing a service or a product to a customer that on-sells them. It could be something about how we help them close more of those deals. It could be just engaging with the customer through regular newsletters, through podcasts, through social media. There are so many ways that we can look at how our customers could be brought back into our business. And in this instance, I’d actually encourage you to go back to an episode I had around nurturing customers. That will certainly give you some ideas around how we could potentially back into our business. And that was episode 87, so not all that long ago. Feel free to jump back to that for some ideation.
But, once we have the data, we understand when customers last transacted with us and the reasons they weren’t transacting with us. The next thing we need to do is build out that playbook of offers. Because once we have that playbook of offers, it gives us something tangible to work with our customers on in a repeated manner that our team can roll out. It’s very much like a sales process whereby if we have our key systems and processes written down and there for everyone to follow, they are more likely to be subscribed to. The same goes here. When we’re trying to have customers who have purchased with us before come back and transact with the business again. If we have a set process or principles or offers that we can roll out to them, it’s much easier for our team to get out and meet those customers again or put offers forward to them to encourage them to transact with us. So this is where things start to get very personalised when it comes to bringing customers back to life, as we say, because when we have the data and we’re very clear around some of the key criteria or the key demographics and infographics of our customers, we also then have when they last purchased with us and why we think they stopped transacting with us, we can take all of those playbooks and build out a matrix style as to the offers that we can have to re-engage these customers.
So, for example, if we have a large group of customers who haven’t transacted with us for 12 months and we suspect the reason that they haven’t transacted with us is because they’re unaware of the other products or services that we offer. We can start a campaign that might have some phone calls to talk through them about how they’re going with that product or service. We could have some newsletters, we could have some emails, some nurturing campaigns that go out to them. We could put some offers or discounts out to get them to try the first part of those offers that we have, those additional offers, we can really get clear around which offer is going to work best for them. Whereas in reverse, if we have a customer who stopped transacting with us because they didn’t have a great experience, that’s going to require a more personalised level of interaction to enable them to come back and work with our business again. Because after all, when someone has had an issue with a business, it’s often needing to see that you care. That will bring them back to wanting to work with you again. So, by having such strong control of this data, a clear offer in terms of a playbook and then the ability to roll that out with customers, we have a strategy. And from that strategy we can start to set targets and goals.
So, for example, if we have a database of a few thousand customers that haven’t transacted with us over a period of time and 10 salespeople within that team, so 2,000 customers, 10 salespeople, there’s 200 each there that that team can start to attack. And depending on workloads, we can phase up and phase down how much time we want to spend on those customers. We can also roll out nurturing campaigns directly through our marketing team. That might be at a more automated level, but they can use some of those key reasons they haven’t transacted to build out those personalised within your key reasons to build out those semi-personalised campaigns. But let’s say we have those 2,000 prospects and 10 salespeople and we decide to allocate out 200 each. Where it gets really impactful is if we can set targets for our team as to number of customers that we’d like to see transacting with the business again over a period of time. So, of those 200, we might be aiming for five a month for the next 12 months to get transacting again with our business. We might be looking at having them over a quarterly period to allow for the ebbs and flows of workflow. Right. But whatever it may be, we can set the targets and then start to celebrate successes. And I’d really encourage in this program to have a very unique or specific way that we might celebrate these successes that really allow for the team to engage with a specific program and be able to carve it out as a unique opportunity to grow revenue within the business.
Where this gets really, really powerful for teams is where we start to roll it into our annual growth targets. So, we will naturally have new targets, new business that we want to build into a business. We are often working on increasing transaction sizes when customers come into the business. But if we can roll in repeat customers, repeat patronage, or people using our products or services over and over again, it can certainly ease the pressure on new customer acquisition. And when we’re easing the pressure on new customer acquisition, it helps our marketing budget, which can often free up money to bring back into this program specifically to allow us to really engage with customers in a meaningful way beyond what the sales team may have scope with.
So, I’ve really stepped through a flow-on effect there that can be impacted by just understanding at a very first point, the data that we have in our business. We then take that data, understand the profile and how long since those customers were transacting with us to build out a playbook, right, a somewhat unique playbook as to how we can roll out offers to customers based on some key reasons as to why they haven’t transacted with us in recent times. From there, obviously, we can roll those programs out, we can use our marketing to help we have nurturing campaigns, and we can start to set targets and measurements for success. And when we start to hit those, really celebrate and of course, most importantly, use those numbers towards our team growth ambitions for the year ahead. So, I see bringing customers back into our business or bringing them back to life as a really integral growth strategy for businesses that have tenure. So, they’re for businesses who have been around a while and have databases that they can work really hard. So, this is a topic that I see often discussed among sales teams, but rarely brought to life with terrific levels of execution. And it’s generally because the allure of winning new customers tends to get in the way.
So as we wound up today, one of my key encouragements is to think about how you could bring a program like this to life in your business. Now, it may not be relevant for you, but if it is, start to carve out some time to plan strategically about how you could bring this to life. Grab a couple of members within your team, see if they can help be leaders or champions or real supporters of this program, and just start to have a look what you could do by reinvigorating people who have previously worked with the business but aren’t doing so now.
So, nice chunky, very unique topic that some businesses really find valuable. And for others, you might find some tangents here that will work really well for you. But certainly, there’s something in there for businesses to really turn that growth tap on outside of winning new customers in the next 12 months.
But one of the key things that I wanted to talk about before we leave was continuing our ongoing health and fitness journey and how as we move into our New Year’s resolutions, which we spoke about last week, progress can really be something integral to seeing a step forward in our lives.
The piece for me that I’ve always been recommended, and this is the last in the series around kind of diet and nutrition and looking after our bodies is that no amount of exercise will get us there on its own, nor will no amount of healthy eating. It really is about a blend of some of the top key things in your lives. And the areas that I’ve consistently been encouraged to focus on are around sleep, diet, stress, exercise, and toxins. Now, many of us will have read this before, but we’re starting that new year, so there are five areas that you can really encourage yourself to start to build small amounts of progress on. Get your sleep right, go to bed at the same time, get up at the same time and try and win more nights than you don’t get your nutrition right. I’ve spoken a couple of times around making sure that essentially in is meaning what goes out and you can do a little bit of baseline work to get that right yourself. The third piece is around exercise again. When we talk about winning more night’s sleep than you lose, it comes the same with exercise. Exercising more days than you don’t is a principle that I’ve always tried to follow. And look, I certainly try to aim for exercise every single day. The fourth one is the stress piece for me. You know, we listen to podcasts, we try and learn and grow to help be better at our professional lives. But if we can manage our stress, then certainly that’s a big impact. And my encouragement here is to do so by finding ways to really strengthen your work-life balance. And the podcast series over the last few weeks has really spoken around making time for urgent tasks, making time for strategic tasks and upskilling your team. But jump back and have a look at the podcast that episode on New Year’s Day around three Christmas wishes and there’s a little bit more in there. And last but not least, is toxins, that’s alcohol, that’s smoking, and that’s all those nasty things. I think we all know what’s good and what isn’t good for us in that respect, but it’s about making sure that we have repeatable behaviours we can follow. And one that is certainly working for me is substituting during the week a beer for a non-alcoholic beer or a non-alcoholic spirit instead of an alcoholic spirit. Right. And that for me has been really impactful in keeping me focused during the week and allowing me to feel a little bit less guilty over the weekends if I enjoy myself.
So, there you go. There’s something there from a non-qualified health expert, but one who has certainly spent a lot of time around this because I believe the best sales leaders actually front up in the ways that their sales teams can aspire to, and that includes health and fitness. That’s it for today. Enjoy the start to the year. Keep living in a world of possibility and you’ll be amazed by what you can achieve. So until next time. Bye for now.
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E97 The Opportunity Many Sales Teams Overlook that Can Generate Real Revenue Growth
