Do I have your attention?
For the past four days we have been participating in The Vernon Company National Sales Meeting held at St. Pete Beach in Florida. What a great time we had! Approximately 145 people coming together to share ideas and to learn new things and most importantly to recharge our working approaches.
Lots of fun was held especially during Vernon's Exclusive Tabletop Show where we had 66 supplier booths just for our sales rep. This provided a great opportunity for our people to learn more about our key supplier partners. For years our emphasis has been to funnel as much business as possible through our key supplier partners. This has never been as important as it is today!
The highlight of the four days had to be our Gulf of Mexico Dinner Cruise. Sponsored by our friends at Bic and Hit we had 165 people eating, drinking and dancing on a three hour sunset cruise. WOW...what a time....but remember what happens on the boat stays on the boat...at least we hope so!
OK...now to the romance part. One of our seminar sessions was aimed at talking about how we can make sure that we get as much as we can from our existing customers. I was making the analogy that going after a new account was much like romancing your girlfriend or boyfriend prior to taking the plunge and getting married. Hopefully some of your remember....the flowers, the romantic dinners and the drives along the beach to see the sunset.
Then you've been married a few years and what. Roses are too expensive...the romantic dinner turns into ordering pizza on a Friday night and gas is too expensive to waste it on a drive to the beach...right???
Hopefully this is not the case but many in our audience seemed to identify with what I was saying.
Now back to the account, we work so hard to go after the account and then we become somewhat complacent. We take things for granted. The creativity is lost and we fall into a rut of calling to see if they want to reorder the same old stuff as last year. All the while that this is going on we better hope that no one is looking at our account like we used to look at our girlfriend because if they start to "romance" them and we are not we may be in jeopardy of losing them.
We all agreed that none of us could afford to lose even one account in this economy. On the contrary we all came to the conclusion that if we put the romance back into all of key accounts we just might get more business out of them.
So we made a pledge to do first things first in our efforts to increase our business for the remainder of 2009. Make sure...darn sure that you are doing everything in our power to take care of our existing accounts. Then and only then can we start to look to get business from others.
Does this make sense? We think so! While many people want to complicate the heck out of what is going on in the economy analyzing and interpreting every single move in the stock market I fall back to that old say....that there is paralysis through analysis!
It is back to basics for us. The simple approach includes...
1. Get more out of your existing accounts
2. Expand to sell additional buyers in the companies that you sell
3. Ask every customer for a referral or testimonial that you can use
4. When going after new prospects look to industries that are familiar to you or that are listed as growth areas...
This is simple advice...no need to analyze....just need to get off your fanny and take some action steps!
Good luck!
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