The start of new fiscal years means breaks in the activity cycle for many vendors and suppliers. This time of the year is a great one to step back and consider how you will protect customer relationships and strengthen prospect ties.
Business plans, especially in venture or internal new market segments, look for every possible piece of revenue. This style of thinking prices training and customer visits as high as the market will bear. Is this the best way to protect and build relationships, especially in trying economic times?
If you are a product enterprise, more than anything else you want the customer to use the product. The “Long Tail” of revenue is an irresistible financial lure with high margins and low costs. Chasing this long tail can create the presumption that nobody needs to pay attention to happy customers. Mature products often suffer from this type of thinking, though this problem is present in any after-sales relationship.
Markets and people changeover.
The customer staff who attended your pre-sales presentations, and who implemented the product are probably no longer paying attention to you. The movers and shakers who drove the project have moved on. The key people who learned the product, and put it into use, have moved on. The supply chain people who found the vendor and did the paperwork to get everything qualified, have moved on. Finance is left looking at the supply chain and maintenance invoices and wants to cut costs.
Your product has become a cost reduction target instead of a value. The same has happened as markets have matured and product upgrades have been made.
Why is this important as the new fiscal year arrives (obviously not the same as Lunar New Year or calendar New Year in many places)?
The ‘downtime’ in the cycle often provides some people time to apply to those “Long Tail” customers. Sales and Account Management staff often aren’t knowledgeable enough to work the current issues relevant to those customers. Support and sales engineers are sometimes more knowledgeable about the customer’s current issues than customer staff. This is an opportunity banging on the bars – loudly!
Every customer likes the sound of “free”. So, provide thousands of dollars of “free” calls to the key account. The long tail customer might really appreciate a ‘free training’ or ‘problem-solving engineering’ call – and video is now acceptable! The costs are lower – and the results can be wonderful.
In a few hours of working with customer staff, an experienced support or sales engineer can almost always find 3-6 new applications, better packaging, new features, or something else of value the customer wasn’t taking advantage. Customers see a problem-solving value whereas before finance only saw the costs. Building a customer relationship with a “face, not just a role” has great value for continued revenue – and fighting back against cutbacks – and dealing with the paperwork.
There are nuances and tactics to make this very successful very quickly.
Please contact us and EkaLore will help you get ahead in the New Year.
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