Help your customers!
Especially when your product list looks like the menu at Cheesecake Factory
On my first day in sales, I went to my manager’s office to get some training on what to do as a salesperson. After three years as an office manager, I was making the big switch to sales.
“Here you go. Here’s your training,” Andy, my manager said. Tossing a tag book across his desk to me was his comical idea of training. A tag book was simply a one ring clip of all our product tags. Like the actual FDA label of ingredients and nutrition info. It probably had around a hundred or so product tags on the ring.
“Great, appreciate the in-depth training,” I sarcastically replied.
Laughing, he followed that up with, “Here you go. Just in case you sell something.” He tossed three different price lists to me this time. All in different colors for the different types of customers: blue for wholesale, green for distributor, and red for retail. They were 8 1/2 by 14-inch sheets of paper, printed on both sides in what had to be size 6 font. Each of the one hundred products had codes, sub-codes, different forms, different packaging sizes. The Cheesecake Factory wasn’t around yet, but these price lists looked exactly like one of their menus. The options were endless.
Heading into the territory, I had a set of current customers and of course prospected for new ones. My faulty thinking was that my current customers understood our products, bought the ones they needed and didn’t need any of the others. With current customers, I really spent most of my time with them on increasing the volume of products they currently bought from me. Again, thinking they must not need my other products since they don’t buy them.
The truth was, in most cases they signed up as a new customer by buying the original products they needed. Then, they really never looked into any of the other products we offered unless they had a problem. More faulty thinking on my part: “They get weekly price lists and frequent communication on sales and promotions we are running. How could they not know we carry other products?”
The answer is, they are busy people! Busy helping their customers. Too busy to decipher our hieroglyphic price list in size 6 font. As a top vendor and a trusted advisor to them, we need to help them understand how to get more of our products and services. This includes how to get more of our trusted advising.
In a recent meeting, a presenter shared a very simple spreadsheet she uses to solve this very problem. See below. In a digital age, this should be very easy to pull from your system. It’s even better if your system is connected to a CRM program. Then you can get this in real time or better yet in some form of a dashboard dial. If you really want to get into it, have this chart in a year over year comparison with a increase/decrease column to see who has added or dropped buying products from you.
Some ways to use this:
- See who is buying which of your products.
- See who is NOT buying specific products.
- Use this to set the agenda for your next sales call with each customer.
- Create categories of users:
- Those that only buy one product line out of our seven
- Those that buy two, three, etc.
- Super users: they buy all of our product lines
- Create promotions, pricing, or service offers for those that meet the higher purchasing levels.
Lastly, one of the most important ways to use this as a salesperson is to drive less and sell more. I know most companies are driven to get salespeople to sign up more prospects. That’s great and definitely needs focus. However, growth is growth. Increasing sales with someone you already have a trusted selling relationship with can be much faster than driving past them to sign up new customers.
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