Building Customer Fortresses

What types of customers make working with them both profitable and a pleasurable? Those that are easy to work with, pay on time, as well as understand and value your services. This doesn’t describe every customer, but it does describe your ideal customers. These are the customers you want to build secure fortresses around. You want to keep them focused on your relationship, not what your competition is doing.

How can you do that? Well, some of the most basic things are the same traits you value in them. Make yourself easy to work with, deliver what you promise and deliver it on time, understand your customer’s needs and let them know that you value their business. For every step you take to improve your relationship with those valued customers, you are building a protective wall around them that your competition can not permeate.

Though it can be years in the making, your ultimate goal with these prospects is to create a true partnership of trust and shared experiences. It’s a nurturing and security building process that begins in your first contact experiences and expands with each interaction. When you’ve done your job right, it will take a lot for your competition to steal that customer away from you.

Here’s what you’re building at each level of your customer fortress.

Beginning relationships are determined by your customer’s needs and the value you bring to the relationship. You become a legitimate provider of the products or service they need. Initially, you are not normally recognized as having any significant, sustainable, competitive edge over alternative companies.

As you continue working with a customer, learning to more fully understand their needs, customers come to see you as a favored source they can trust their business to. At this point you have successfully progressed from just being an approved vendor. Because you are known and have proven yourself in past business activities they will normally seek you out even in the face of competitor alternatives.

The next level is where your patterns of listening and diligently striving to put your customer’s need above your sales pitch begin to pay off. Based on the combination of the products and services you offer, and the value-added knowledge or services you offer, your customers view you not only as a vendor, but also as a consulting resource on how to best use the products or services you specialize in.

You are beginning the change over from asking, “What can I help you with,” to your customer coming to you and saying, “I have a problem and I want your input.” You have shown you care about meeting their business needs, so they continue coming to you with problems they know you can help solve. Even so, it becomes important to remember that listening always comes before selling. If you become over confident thinking the customer is an “easy sale”, you will diminish their trust in you.

Assuming that you have identified the economic value of your customers and have done all that you can to earn their trust and respect over the years; you still haven’t reached your ultimate goal. You are never done adding value to the relationship but now you and the customer need to look toward the future. Can your customer feel secure enough in your business relationship to begin looking beyond current needs to future business objectives? Above and beyond the products and services you offer, do they see you as a source of strategic planning assistance for dealing with broader-based challenges they face.

The customer’s belief base in the relationship creates ultimate trust. Years down the road you will continue to be seen as a long-term partner whose contributions-- products, insights, process, etc. are critical to the customer’s long-term success. As long as you stay true to the knowledge and service they have come to expect from you, they will turn to you as a source of help in developing and building their own business.

In this type of relationship you have effectively completed a fortress around your customer relationship. They may be aware of the competition, but they hold very little attraction for your customer. It is you, your value, and the trust that has built between you, that keeps them from straying not the product or price you offer.

It all goes back to the two questions. Why are you in sales and why is a prospect/customer buying? The best businesses know the answers to both and they’ve worked to form long-term trusted partnerships with those prospects whose needs and desires best compliment their own.

And the bottom line? As you move up, from step to step, through the customer relationships, building partnership fortresses, those customers will buy more stuff from you. In our experience it’s about a 20% increase. See, I told you money was part of it.

Sales, and generating sales leads, are about building relationships that make you money and keep making you money.

The Objective of Prospect Relationships

Why do you really want additional customers? No, really—I’m serious. What is it that drives you to seek out new prospects and new business opportunities? When was the last time you really thought about your reasons for being in sales?

There are all kinds of reasons, and yes, money is one of them. That can’t be overlooked. But, I’m betting there are other reasons outside of that paycheck which keep you coming back to work and back to nurture your business every day. There are things in this life that are worthwhile to be passionate about and one of those things, I hope, is your business.

Now, turn the tables. What is it that drives a customer to buy your product or service? Why would they choose your company over the next guy’s? Is it about passion for them as well? Probably, just not about the exact same things you are passionate about. The trick is finding out how the two of you fit together. Like any good relationship, a customer relationship can and should be about more than money. It’s about finding a good fit and a synergistic relationship. It’s about respect and value that goes beyond dollar signs.

I talked a little bit about this when I encouraged you to define your ideal client. To be successful, you need a very good understanding of your own drives and motivations and an even better understanding of your prospective client’s drives and motives.

First, let’s realize a general assumption. There are two kinds of prospects: new and seasoned. What do I mean by that? Basically, you will encounter two different types of consumer. The first – new – is a new player. They are new to the need for your type of service. They are start up companies or those who are learning a new way of doing things. (Think Grandma shopping for her first cell phone.) The second – seasoned – have been in the game for a while. They know what their needs are, they know how and what they want to buy, and they’ve done it all before. (Think about the teenage grandson Grandma brought shopping with her who is one his fifth cell phone.)

New and seasoned prospects have to be approached differently but your end goals are the same. You both want a positive outcome to your buying and selling relationship.

I’ll focus for just a minute on the seasoned prospect. Why? It’s a matter of logistics. They’re the ones you’ll encounter most often and the biggest question you’ll have is: are they buying from me or my competition?

Having completed millions of prospecting activities, we have learned a thing or two from the tens of thousands of sales opportunities we’ve generated at Ekstrom and Associates. Among these things is the fact there is relatively little complete brand loyalty. There can be substantial loyalty to a provider or vendor, but there typically isn’t blind loyalty to the brand as a whole. This is what you need to focus on. A prospect’s loyalty is generally focused on the company, not the brand of the product. Even if it’s there, loyalty to a brand will not stop you from taking business away from the competition.

Prospecting always works, and if you want to go after your competitors’ best clients there isn’t a better tool. What percentage of your existing clients left you and your company in the past five years? It’s likely that your competition suffered the same loss. Your ability to prospect, among other things, allows you the opportunity to learn firsthand, from your competition’s clients themselves, how dissatisfied they are with your competition. Use that knowledge to draw them away from your competition to you.

In order to take opportunities away from the competition you must be willing to step up to the plate where these seasoned buyers are telling you they have dissatisfactions. You need to know your ideal customer: their drives and passions and be willing to foster a relationship based on their needs. You look for additional services to provide that show your company is passionate about they’re needs.

First, you look for and fill an immediate need, then you work to keep these people by building a fortress around your relationship. These efforts: taking the most attractive clients away from your competition, and guiding you in building a fortress around them are what Ekstrom and Associates specializes in.

It can be that simple. Build a stout fortress around your most valuable clients and tear down the fortresses your competitor’s have built. It doesn’t make economic sense to take 10 great clients from your competition and lose 10 great clients in the process. Let them know how much you value their business. If you don’t show them they are a valued customer, they will find a company who will.

Nurturing Client Relationships

It may seem counter-intuitive, but one of the best places you can start focusing your prospecting efforts is with your existing clients.

Take a serious look at what you are offering to your current clients-- what brought them to you and what it will take to keep them coming back. Consider the following avenues for nurturing and improving client relationships.

Cross-selling: If you were an auto dealer and sold someone a car, where would you want them to service that car? Cross-selling is actively looking at a client’s purchasing habits and finding addition products and services that fit their needs. The advantage of this type of activity come is several areas. First, it is the quickest and easiest way available to generate sales opportunities. The clients you are cross-selling to already have a trust relationship with you. They know your organization, their buying power and credit are already established, they know what to expect from the people and products in your company. Additionally, you are forming more ties between your company and your client. The more of their business you acquire, the less likely they are to pull up stakes and look to your competition in the future.

New Products and Services: What do you currently know about your customers? When was the last time you reviewed the services you offer and found something missing? Where did you file that last suggestion from a customer that said, “It would be nice if . . .”

Ekstrom and Associates recommends that you spend some time every three months reviewing the results of your prospecting efforts. Look for feasible, short-term projects that can help fill these types of niches. Plan for larger changes according to your client’s feedback and long-term needs.

Public Relations: If you decide to make a change or offer an additional client benefit, how will you let your clients, and the general public know? Over the years, Ekstrom and Associates has helped with a variety of promotional efforts. We have assisted clients by helping them announce an assortment of events. We’ve also sorted Marketing and Sales Databases, isolating specific groups or types of users to be targeted for a specific model or type of service. We’ve supported customer appreciation barbeques and annual golf events. For one client, we invited his customers to visit one of their locations, see a famous race car and meet the driver. We’ve invited customers and prospects to attend new branch openings and participated in different types of “thank you” campaigns.

Your goal is to establish yourself in the eyes of the public as a company actively trying to serve the needs of its clients. Public relations events are only limited by your imagination and budget.

Brand Recognition: That brings up the subject of brand recognition. Does your name easily come to mind when your customer has a problem, question or purchasing need? Has your company recently changed hands, acquired another company, been acquired, or changed something significant about your product, marketing, focus, or logo? How will you let your clients know how to find you?

I like the word attractive. It probably won’t overcome a down economy, but being attractive does not diminish one’s opportunities. So, how attractive can you become in the market? What can you do to enhance your attractiveness? How good can you get? How good can your employees get? The more attractive you are the more clients you keep and the more you can attract from your competition.

Customer Service: How do your clients perceive their value to you? What can you do to provide that small, unexpected, extra effort? When it comes to all your selling and prospecting efforts, are you seen as the one who honestly wants to make things better for your client, not just increase your own bottom line? This is another very effective way to form tendrils of trust and build protective walls around your clients. If they feel important and valued, they usually do not stray very far.

The last thing you want is to lose a relationship because they were looking for a product or service you didn’t, but could have easily, offered. Nurture your clients until that relationship is fortified enough that they never think to look somewhere else. That is the surest way to retain established relationships, nor will you have to work twice as hard to entice that prospect back at a later time.

Looking for a place to start your prospecting efforts? Get to know your current clients first