Do You Know How to Protect Your Top Clients from The Competition?

It’s a scary world out there for sales folks. Solution sellers must constantly protect your top clients and be on the watch for the competition who would all too happily snag profitable customers away.  There are, however, some effective solution selling strategies that can shield your customers from the slings and arrows of better pricing, more favorable discounts, better service, etc. Sales managers who apply these strategies to protect your top clients can tell you that they work.

3 Ways to Protect Your Top Clients from The Competition

1. Be Customer Intimate
   Being customer intimate means truly knowing your customers at the organizational, personal, and professional levels. This allows you to create lasting and mutually beneficial connections.  It all starts with understanding the type and quality of your ideal target customer and then rationalizing your current client base to align with your sales strategy.  The rationalization process should include understanding both customer acquisition and service costs.  The goal: you want to focus on customers who appreciate your unique value proposition that have the most short- and long-term potential to be profitable, growing and satisfied.  
2. Look at the Types of Customer Relationships
   Top solution sellers have established deep and strong ties with their customers, and they are accordingly treated like trusted advisors rather than simple service providers. These top sellers consistently seek strong company-to-company entanglement to protect your top clients from teh competition.

   The sales strategy here should be to balance the kind of relationship you want with the kind of relationship you foster. If you are looking to build a kind of interdependence, you must provide significant and differentiated value with every customer interaction. In addition, you must keep in close contact with these customers so you know their business almost as well as they do. This is how you become enmeshed in the relationship and a necessary partner in your customer’s success.

3. Develop a Strategy for Transactional Customers
   We know from solution selling training that not all customers prefer to buy in the same way at the same time for the same reasons. In fact, many customers are not looking for long-term partnerships or trusted advisors. They simply want what you have to offer. To retain these customers in a way that makes sense, you must be reliable and ready to deliver when the product or service is needed in a way that aligns with your overall brand promise.

   Understand that if you fail to deliver, raise your price, have an arduous buying process or try to sell too many value-added solutions, they are likely to bolt to your competition. Why keep them? Because as long as they do not distract you from other ideal target clients they are most likely relatively low maintenance and profitable.

As solution sellers, your best overall strategy is to focus your time and energy on developing strong and lasting relationships with the customers that bring you the greatest value in a way that aligns with your overall brand promise.

To learn more about how to protect your top clients, download this Research-Backed Sales Toolkit for Sales Leaders Now