Fast track to more sales: Are you missing out?
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Posted: Wed 4th Dec 2024
For all businesses, there is one asset that never makes it to the balance sheet — your business relationships.
Strong customer relationships are the key to more sales. Without customers, there are no sales at all. Yet, many businesses are not aware of the true potential of their contact databases. Are you one of them?
In this article, I’ll highlight one key mistake that might be negatively affecting your sales — and an easy way to turn your contact database, no matter how big or small, into a powerful sales-generating machine.
Beware of contact depreciation
What if I tell you that I have email addresses of tens of thousands of high-quality leads? Isn’t it great? Not really. The question isn’t about how many contacts I have but rather what I do with these connections.
Contacts in your database are similar to the money you have in your bank account. If you just keep accumulating money and not doing anything with it, inflation will eat up the majority of your savings.
Similarly, if you keep accumulating contacts and not doing much with them, your relationships with these contacts will depreciate over time. They need your time, effort and consistent communication.
In the economy, inflation is the depreciation of the value of money. When we extrapolate this concept to business contacts, inflation means the depreciation of the value and quality of these connections. It has three major consequences:
Missed opportunities: When you don’t engage consistently with potential business partners or customers, you’ll lose the connection
Lower sales revenue: If you are not consistently warming up your leads, you’ll struggle to close deals. It takes several follow-ups to get a reply
Loss of repeat business: If you don’t regularly check in with existing customers, you’re no longer at the top of their minds
The cost of depreciated relationships can be huge. Getting a new customer costs up to 25 times more than retaining an old one. Still, 44% of companies don’t calculate their customer retention rates.
Even if you’re not aware of it, contact depreciation is slowly nibbling on your sales — but there’s an easy way to stop it and avoid it in the future.
The fastest way to sales growth
One of the solutions to contact depreciation is nurturing and consistent communication, which 80% of small businesses see as one of their top priorities.
However, if you’re struggling with nurturing, you’re not alone: the majority of tools are not built for it. They give a false sense of control by allowing you to manage data and automate processes. But one cannot automate a relationship; it needs a human touch.
If you want to grow sales, your approach to business connections needs to change. That’s why it’s important to have actionable follow-up reminders next to any contact in your database. Instead of sorting them alphabetically or by the size of the sales deal, you need to sort them by the urgency of your next interaction with them.
Watch this webinar to discover how consistent follow-up can significantly increase customer loyalty and repeat business:
Joe Bloggs and Jane Doe
Let me explain how it works. Say, I have two potential customers — Joe Bloggs and Jane Doe:
By looking only at the deal size, you might think that I should focus only on Jane. But what you don’t see is that Joe is already waiting for the contract. He’s ready to pay. If I don’t have a reminder set next to him straight away, I might lose $5,000.
During one of our initial meetings, Joe also mentioned he’s interested in signing a much bigger deal next year. If I don’t have a reminder scheduled in a few months, I might forget about this and lose potential business with Joe.
With follow-up reminders next to every contact in my database, I can still work on nurturing Jane without neglecting other business relationships.
To grow sales, businesses often don’t need complex tools with multiple add-ons. A simple list of reminders can be a game changer. These reminders include various tasks, such as sending follow-ups, updating contact details, or drafting invoices, all sorted by priority from most to least urgent ones. This creates a constant flow of actions — or an 'action stream'.
Fostering the new mindset
By organising your business contacts into an 'action stream', you not only reverse depreciation but open doors for more opportunities.
Have an honest look at your contact database: Does it look like a bubbling stream of sales activities or rather like a motionless lake? Streams constantly move, they don’t let your customer relationships stagnate. So regardless of what tool you use to manage your contacts, make sure it facilitates the stream mindset.
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