How to monetize a customer base

Let us take it as an undeniable fact: even with a constant flow of incoming calls, the presence of active sales is necessary for stable growth. Asset #1 of any business, at any stage of development is the base of clients.

What is a client base, in fact, is a portfolio of your shares. When you have 10 clients in your base – not enough, with 10 clients will not sell anything. When you have 1000 warm clients in your base – it’s good sales. In sales, it is important to add new, warm contacts to this base every day – especially for businesses with long sales cycles. It may take 1-2 months, or maybe a year before a customer matures to give you their money.

When you have your own database of potentially interested or already bought customers, you can do interrogations, because several times a year some new service (or product) comes out and you have the opportunity to call this base and offer them new products.

In addition, constant internal analytics, discipline and measurement are important for business. The sales manager must have a certain daily schedule and must be able to measure the conversion from cold calls to “warm” customers, from calls made on a “warm” base to specifically put up commercial offers or meetings and, accordingly, to sales. In general, until you have turned into a multi-level company, with several branches, there is no urgent need to purchase software, you can, for example, keep statistics in Google Doc. Anyway, at the stage of launching the analytics system, it is enough to start building the system with a simple table in excel. As soon as you experience that measurements and statistics are necessary for growth and development – you can choose the most appropriate CRM-system for your needs.

It is very important to make strictly regulated number of calls daily, from 30 to 100. Conversion from cold calls rarely exceeds 10%, depending on the qualification of the caller and the base. When a certain number of calls is made every day, the warm database is replenished and, knowing the conversion data for each specific seller, we get a simple mathematical model: when we know that if one manager makes 1000 calls a month, he will have about 50 warm customers, of 50 warm ones there will be 2-3 deals with an average check. In this way you can predict sales and company income, collect statistics and manage the sales process.

Dependence on “calls and money”
Starting the process of statistics collection, in a few months we can already see a direct correlation, for example, “500 calls provide a certain amount of net profit and 10-30% of this amount is received by managers. After a few months, the sales manager gets the understanding that he does not just make calls, but that each call is a certain amount of money. And he treats it differently already. This is the most important tool for motivating your employees, but before building the system, you should start with measurements.

About conversion measurements, the sales funnel.
In order to achieve results, you must have everything counted in numbers: if you made 100 calls, you must understand how many warm clients you have and how these clients are then converted into money. In addition, each seller, in relation to himself must understand what his conversion at each stage of working with clients. Every seller has a different conversion rate, someone has a 3% conversion rate, someone has a 7% or 10% conversion rate, someone has a 1% conversion rate – especially if the employee has just arrived and is still gaining experience. However, if you have implemented scripts, the new employee will quickly improve his performance. Scripts for calls, meetings and negotiations. Scripts or scripts always increase sales, because your salespeople stop “carrying” themselves. A familiar situation: Your employee calls someone in the office and asks if they need your product (or service). The customer says, “No,” to which the salesperson means, “All right,” says, “Thank you for your time. Have a nice day”? Not the most profitable option, is it? There should be a script that says your employees should say “no” in response. When there’s a scenario, sales always go up.

How to monetize a customer base

The necessary scripts for the sales department work

-receiving a call from a client,
-an outgoing call to a warm client,
-worked as an online consultant,
-Call a cold client,
-conducting meetings and negotiations.

Customers as a competitive advantage
Once again, customers are your number 1 asset and in the competition for each of them you must be the best. In any market, when you try to sell something, you have to ask yourself why the client should choose you, what benefits he will get. Why, what you offer is better than 100500 competitors. The trouble with many sellers is that they are trying to sell the same thing as everyone else. It has a very strong impact, the conversion suffers a lot, because it is very hard to sell the same thing as everyone else. Everybody sells green apples, and you sell green apples too, and when you start selling red apples – your sales increase for some reason ;).

It is important to remember that when we talk about competitive advantages, they must be formulated in the language of benefits. How do you encourage your customer to think fast? If you work in an area where long sales are common, you need to encourage the customer to think fast. Perhaps at the first meeting, the client will not buy, but will be able to buy in a week, in two, but not in a year.

Reinforce the offer.
When the customer needs to reach the sale, you need to strengthen the offer. That is it is necessary to let the client understand that the special price is valid only today, that the number of clients with whom you are ready to work is limited, that only at purchase now you are ready to give installments of payment or bonuses. Surely you have your own examples of bonuses that you use in order to get the client to the deal?

Of course, when you change the welcome to an offer boost, the customer buys in a certain percentage of cases, but if you do not apply the welcome, the customer can think endlessly.

The human psyche is arranged so that if there are no restrictions, the person will make decisions for a very long time. As long as he thinks he is being sold by one of your competitors, if you tell the client: here is my offer, but I have two other clients with whom I am currently negotiating and I can only take one – then the reaction to this offer may be different, that is, you tell the client that “within three days I will take either you or others. Who’s first, the slippers;)

CrossSell is a way to increase profits.
CrossSell – sale of related services. A lot of people forget about it, but if you go to McDonald’s, you know that the hamburger will offer you a Coke, to the stake something else. They’ve put it in the system because, as annoying as it is to you and me, this endless “will you try the pie?” McDonald’s is doing a lot of turnover on this, so you should, too. The system has to be implemented into your business, because when you sell a single product, you can sell a range of related products or services with much more ease – it increases the average check by 20-30 sometimes even by 100 percent.

Another way to increase your sales by several times.
There is a very simple way to speed up your sales by several times. Partners can act as this accelerator. In almost any business, it works. Any business needs its agents and partners – all of this leads to the following results: one project for the price of N through an agent is actually sold in absentia, because the partner has arrived, sold everything himself, and you only have to come to sign a contract, talk to the client for about half an hour. Your sales in this way can be accelerated from 4 to 10 times.