How to Immunise Your Clients against Competitive Infections
Executive Sales Management teams are expensive. The higher commitment the longer it takes to get the order. Closing the big one can carry a huge risk, and while the costs are high so are the returns.
Where the market is geographically diverse and territorially complex, a localised approach to relationship management should be considered.
A solution to any B2B pipeline management will manifest in the development and established network of relationship managers functioning in a varity of rolls to further the reach of a senior management team.
A network of relationship managers can drive interested prospects to a managed platform of services designed to engage the prospect by adding value as a solution, furthering the opportunity to incentivise reciprocated engagement.
Networking takes time. It takes time to enhance the revenue of your clients. Or save them money on a loan or a major purchase. It takes time to write letters to enable your clients’ children to attend the schools they prefer. It takes time to build up a database of suppliers other than yourself who can best fulfil your clients other needs. It takes time to establish a network of networks. But every time you give a client service, beyond your core service, you’re building up immunities within your clients, immunities to competitive infections.
Steve Foster believes the ideal outcome to market dominance for any B2B enterprice is a managed team of Relationship Managers who feed the sales pipeline with warm, getting warmer, simmering to boiling relationships.
Management via a CRM program integrating wide area networks can facilitate a mobile team in every state capital. Driving business intelligence with CRM reporting to a central management point; furthering the informed to direct; quantifying the pipeline value in terms of cost per sale.
It’s the ability to network and leverage personal relationships.
In essence, it’s consistently focusing on being a master networker.
When you think of the word networking, you picture yourself shoving business cards in people’s faces at boring luncheons and cocktail parties while trying to escape a man with a coleslaw stain handlebar moustache who doesn’t get the idea that you don’t want to talk to him.
That’s not networking. That is what I call, ‘pest working.’ Meaning, you’re being a pest to someone, or someone is being a pest to you.
What I see as a cost effective strategy to get more people in your sales pipeline, is a managed network of networkers with a mandate to be a solutions provider for key individuals in the prospective client’s enterprise.
People who will be the:-
- The Family Adviser.
- The Advocate.
- The Publicist.
- The Mentor.
- The Talent Scout.
- The Purchasing Agent.
- The Loan Broker.
- And the Revenue Enhancer.
We are not talking about the highly paid executive here. We are thinking about the everyday people who love to get things done and enjoy the feeling of doing it.
They are not asking for the order, they are ordering/orchestrating the the next step in the sales pipeline.
No institution can possibly survive if it needs geniuses or supermen to manage it. It must be organized in such a way as to be able to get along under a leadership composed of average human beings.
Peter Drucker