Customer Relationships

In order to combat this frustration and fear of product obsolescence, producers offer you over-the-air updates that upgrade your product’s software to perform new tasks and make your user experience, in general, more satisfying.

It’s that time of year. The holidays loom, there is a chill in the air, and countless articles appear providing guidance to sales representatives about how to close the year strong. The five, ten or twenty best strategies are outlined in checklists to insure end-of-year success. “Contact every client” is an action often recommended, as is “Revisit prospects who have chosen another vendor.”

We’ve all heard the sobering statistics that winning a new major account costs far more than keeping one – depending on the study you read, perhaps twenty times as much. And we’ve all heard how even a small increase in a firm’s overall major client retention rate has an exponentially positive effect on revenues and profits. We also know, of course, that, on the flip side, decreases in retention rates produce similarly negative impacts, often devastating and long-lasting.

We all know the statistics. Most selling organizations derive 80% of their revenues from 20% of their clients. Winning a new major account costs up to 20 times more than keeping a current one. And even a small percentage increase in a firm’s major client retention rate can have an exponentially positive effect on revenues – while similar decreases can produce negative financial impacts, often devastating and long-lasting.

Here are five simple ways we can improve the quality of our communication with the people who are currently buying from us and expand and deepen those relationships over time.

Read Time: 8 Minutes

Let’s state the obvious here: Your customer is your business and customer satisfaction is crucial to the success of your business.So how are you measuring customer satisfaction? If you’re like most businesses, you’re using customer feedback surveys. (And if you’re not, you should get on board.)

Read Time: 6 Minutes

Sean Coyle, Sandler trainer, prospecting expert, and David H Sandler Award winner talks about how to lower defensive walls and build rapport quickly in a sales call. Learn the attitudes, behaviors, and techniques of master salespeople and prospectors who can quickly and easily build trust with their prospects.

Learn how to engage and partner with gatekeepers to get to more decision-makers. Sean Coyle is Sandler's prospecting expert and host of the online course. In this episode, Sean talks about the attitudes, behaviors, and techniques of top sellers and how they interact with gatekeepers and admins. 

Learn how to do a simple five-part client satisfaction call using the RECON framework. Caroline Robinson, Sandler trainer from the UK, talks about checking in with your clients and getting on the same page.

Most of us are good listeners, the people we talk to just never know it. They don’t know it because we don’t engage in a proactive manner which ensures they feel heard. Often when conflict arises, we try to listen, but because the individual we engage doesn’t feel heard, their defensive gates remain firmly shut and we can’t find resolution.

Typically, defensive gates to communication are brought up out of response to a situation similar out of the past. It is a preprogrammed reaction against a historical precedent that we have to fight against. To do this we have to illustrate and explain how the present and ourselves are significantly different from the past and past experience.

So how do we make sure that the other party knows that we are not only listening, but that we understand what they are saying? When breaking down communication there are a few key strategies which will help your counterpart feel heard and ensure you can get to a resolution, read more on how to be heard and help others feel heard.