What is the one thing that, if you could have your client-facing teams implement on a consistent basis, would bring in more revenue?
Notice the question wasn’t about what your sales or commercial team could do differently, but about all your teams that have client or customer contact. A large percentage of most B2B organizations spend some of their time at least, interacting with customers. Therefore we are now potentially talking about a significant number of people in your organization. What could they each do that would significantly drive more income for the business?
It might seem strange to suggest that your customer-success team, your people who are working with your customers on a regular basis as part of your offering, and even your accounts team, could be instrumental in bringing in more profit. But they all can. You would not want to make them all into “salespeople”, but in all seriousness, everyone in your organization can make a positive difference (or, if you are not careful, a negative difference).
Your clients buy you and what you do for them. They don’t buy because they have been sold to. So to increase revenue and keep existing revenue everybody is involved to some degree.
There is so much uncertainty in the economy at the moment. Your organization needs to stand out and perhaps it is now vital to show why your clients need your kind of offering at all. They might feel they can just park what you do for them for the time being as they look to stretch thin budgets. If that is all true, what can you train your personnel to do to increase the chance of positive income growth?
The answer is simple to express, more complicated to implement. Ideally you want your people to ask one more question in their conversations with their contacts. I other words, train your teams to be genuinely curious. Curious about why the client wants what they want and why they want it that way. Curious about who else they are using for this or similar issues. Curious about their plans and how they see you fitting in with those. Curious about who else you should be talking to in their organization or other organizations.
The sort of questions you’d want your team to ask would range from very basic diagnostic questions such as “What is the problem you are trying to solve?” through reversing questions when dealing with objections such as “When you say we’re expensive, what does that mean?” all the way through to more subtle presumptive questions such as “When you had your quarterly review with your other supplier, what did you find?”
There isn’t space in a blog to go through all the questioning techniques in detail. If you’d like to see if we can get all your client-facing people asking just one more question to help increase revenue, contact me and I’ll talk you through how we have done just that for other B2B organizations, ranging from manufacturing, distribution and consultancy firms across Surrey, Sussex, Berkshire, Hampshire and Kent.
Paul Glynn
Sandler trainer
