Characteristics of Selling

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(upbeat music) Welcome to the Characteristics of Selling. In these lessons, we'll go over the concepts of customer retention, customer relationship management, and focusing on customer needs. Modern selling has four characteristics: customer retention or deletion, customer relationship management, adding value and satisfying needs, and marketing products and services. Traditional sales and marketing are focused on getting new business. Modern companies are adopting retention models, which focus on gaining repeat customers rather than constant new ones. Another name for retention is relationship marketing. In business-to-business, or B2B sales, salespeople have the ability to be goodwill ambassadors for their company and brand, forming relationships with customers that help drive long-term sales. Some companies have added the account management model to their relationship marketing strategies. Account management is where an individual salesperson, or team of salespeople, work with specific accounts on all of their customers' needs. A study across industries show that a 5% increase in customer retention created a 25 to 95% increase in profit. Retaining customers may not be easy, but if you do the work to retain your customers, it will pay off in the end. Here are five tips to help you retain your customers. One, give out surveys. Ask your customers to fill out anonymous surveys. This can give you feedback on what you are doing well and what you should be working on. When you address any of the issues covered in the survey, your customers will know their opinions matter. Two, be an expert. Customers are expecting you to be an expert and tell them everything they should know. Learn everything possible about your products and your competitors' products. Three, treat every customer like they are important. Take time to get to know your customers so you can connect with them and make them feel valued. Four, show your values. The Harvard Business Review found that, among customers who have strong relationships with businesses, 64% did so, because they could identify with the business values. Five, be proactive with customer support. Do not wait for a problem to occur. Reach out to customers after they have bought a product. See how the product is working, and if the customer has had any issues with it. If there are issues, resolve them quickly. While you want to retain as many customers as possible, sometimes it's necessary to remove customers from the roster. Customers who do not generate profits or enough volume can actually cost the company more money than they bring in. Sometimes these are problem customers. They use excessive resources and can hurt employee morale. Let's say you have a printing company, and one of your customers only orders a small quantity of reprints of his book once a year or so. When he orders, he insists that you provide extra packaging for his books, and he calls numerous times a day until his order arrives. So far, every time his book arrives, he calls with an issue about how his books were shipped. You may find that the cost of doing business with him, due to the constant customer service calls, extra time shipping his books, and the infrequency of his orders, may outweigh the profit you make from printing his books. This would be a prime example of the type of customer who you would want to remove from your roster. As a salesperson, it is your job to communicate with your sales manager. You are the point person who would best know what it will take to retain certain customers, as well as which customers may need to be removed.