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Turning contacts to contracts

Written by: Kirk Kjellberg

Article Overview: In sales we all have the idea we have to charge, charge ahead! Keep looking in the bushes and making new contacts. But what about all those contacts you already have? Read this article to find a way to milk the information cow on your desk and in the company file cabinet.

Turning contacts to contracts

Sure it's tough out there these days. It takes twice as many cold calls to land an appointment, twice as many appointments to land a deal. Twice as much negotiating to get the deal closed. You linger longer at the coffee shop; it takes more oomph just to pick up the phone. Wonder what to do next?

While making cold calls to people you don't know is widely accepted as the best way to generate new business, in more tumultuous times perhaps it's time to look to the people you already know? Your customers are all right there, on your desk, in your contact manager, in Outlook or hanging with the dust-bunnies inside your file cabinet...

A Google search for the term Six Degrees of Separation got over 9 million hits, including books, screenplays and countless articles and web pages. We know it's real, the human web of interconnectedness is alive. Yet most businesspeople, let alone salespeople, don't spend nearly enough time milking their contact list or that of their friends and business associates.

Let’s take me for example. I am a decided underachiever on Linkedin.com, (think Facebook for professionals), where I have a mere 80 contacts. However, according to the folks at Linkedin, when you multiply my contact’s connections by all of their connections, it means that I could count my extended connections to be about 1,693,200!

For the sake of argument, let’s say they are off by 90%! That leaves me a scant 169,320 possible contacts. The question is; why do salespeople and businesses lose interest in the people who have already bought from them or people that they already know, (their connections)? If six of your current customer knows six other people, couldn’t you talk to them and the six other people they each know? That is thirty-six potential contacts. One of the biggest reasons salespeople have to look for fresh customers is they are unsure of how their current customer feels about them because of poor or unknown customer experience / customer satisfaction.

If your dogs are barking from hitting the pavement everyday, take the day off! Stay in your office, raid the file cabinet and start reacquainting yourself with those who are already your customers. If there have been any changes in staff, can you take over any “unmanned accounts”? Cowboy up and take over a troubled account and turn it around! Bring a dozen doughnuts to all your accounts with your business card taped to it. The bottom line is there is active business up for grabs going on behind you.

I am always amazed when a salesperson says they had an account “stolen” from them by their competitor. The question in my head is; did they steal it, or did you give it to them via lack of attention?

If you don’t pay attention to your customers, someone else will!

Kirk Kjellberg

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Article Tags: coffee shop, cold calls, contact manager, div, dust bunnies, endif, fareast, gte, mso, new business, oomph, orphan, paper source, roman style, span style, style definitions, style font, style name, times new roman, tumultuous times
Referred by: http://www.salesblogcast.com



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