Colleen’s Blog

Are you prepared to lose your biggest customer?

A client of mine recently emailed me and mentioned that they lost two of their biggest clients.

Quarterly business reviews are essential for understanding potential growth with existing customers, retention issues and future opportunities. They are just as crucial for troubleshooting where sales performance isn’t meeting expectations, as well as for measuring the return on investment your client is receiving for the work you do together. Get serious about doing this analysis.

A large number of my clients this year are looking to grow and retain their existing account base. They want to grow and retain those existing accounts at the highest level possible in their marketplace to better serve them and provide more value.

I was working with a group of sales managers at a workshop a few weeks ago and one of them introduced this strategy. It was a very simple strategy of implementing an account plan when you didn’t have a sophisticated account planning process.

   We've seen a lot of very high performing sales managers that come through our program. And one thing I noticed was that most of them were never the best salesperson in their organization. In fact, the majority of them had very little sales experience. They had enough to be credible in the marketplace and they had enough sales experience to know what it is like to face rejection and to get a big win.

   A few months ago, I was privileged to be invited to a seminar hosted by Gartner featuring a small group of top level thought leaders in sales. There were about six of us around the table and we got a preview of Gartner's research that they were rolling out at their sales summit later in the year. We assessed and discussed the research—in particular, how it applied to our clients.

Many of you have read a lot of the work we've done on account management. But here's what's really critical about account management.

Most of my clients have a practice where they do quarterly business reviews with their best customers. This is something that I advocate as a best selling practice for key account management.