So how can your sales department retain customers and maximise selling opportunities throughout the recession and beyond?

In the current economic climate, and for the next six months, retaining profitable customers, maximising on any new selling opportunities and improving efficiencies while cutting costs is absolutely imperative.

When faced with a tough sales environment every potential sale is vital and therefore organisations with a large number of customers or a wide array of products cannot afford missed opportunities due to a lack of simple business intelligence.

So how can your sales department retain customers and maximise selling opportunities throughout the recession and beyond?

First of all don’t panic and buy a complete new CRM or ERP system! In the past companies requiring data analytics and sales information tools have thrown significant time and money into CRM projects, producing reports from ERP systems and implementing mobile technologies without witnessing results which justify the time and expenditure.

These tools may produce a series of smart graphs and reports, but the sales and management teams are still left to interpret them to find relevant, meaningful information or to identify trends that will enable them to make informed decisions.

Rather than endless reports, what sales people need is an alert- an immediate call to action when there is a missed opportunity that needs to be plugged. To give your salespeople this information look at using a bolt on software as a service (Saas) to your current ERP service.

These can be implemented within days, with minimal upfront costs and followed by a monthly subscription, thus minimising your capital expenditure. Ask to see it working with your own data to prove that it will provide a tangible return on investment.

Next focus on retaining existing customers as it will cost you around six times as much to acquire a new customer as it will to keep a current one. To do this you should ensure you are going into each customer sales call armed with an in-depth knowledge of your customer.

You should know not only the products they are currently purchasing from you, when they last bought from you and how much they bought – but more importantly what they should be buying from you that they are currently sourcing elsewhere. Knowing exactly what services and products your customers are buying from your competitors will enable you to advise them that this is something they should be looking at buying from you.

In addition you should do your utmost to get to grips with a customer’s buying patterns and behaviour. Remember that customers are under the same pressure that you are in a recession.

In tough times the natural reaction for customers is to cut spending which means their purchasing behaviour will change as they focus on non-discretionary purchases, better value products and low-cost services.

It is vital that you spend more effort and effectively use your customer data to understand customers' behaviour if you are to respond to customers with value propositions tailor-made for a recession. Customers who are actively looking for better value products can actually be a ‘blessing in disguise’ as this is a great opportunity to switch them to your own brand at less cost to them and higher margin to you.

Returns and rebates may also be on the increase so efficient management of credits will be imperative. However, the worst thing you can do is to indiscriminately discount/drop prices simply to achieve more sales. Make sure you know how this will affect your margins and ascertain whether or not the anticipated increase in volume of sales is likely to make it worthwhile.

Finally, in order to maximise selling opportunities it is vital that you take the time to identify your most profitable initiatives and product lines. When times are hard and sales are harder to come by it is essential for your salespeople to use their time efficiently. This is the ideal time to use your data to identify customers who are either unprofitable, or who you cannot really serve well enough to grow their profitability.

This will enable your sales team to prioritise those customers who hold the greatest potential for further sales. Otherwise, in a tough financial climate even the top sales professionals will waste time trying only for the big sale to find out they have no budget, or servicing customers who may spend but who are no longer profitable.
 

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