We know it’s easier to convert an existing customer than it is to develop a new one – but limiting ourselves to only selling to current cuctomers limits the impact and income we can make.
What if we could turn our existing customers into a source of intelligence for how to better convert new prospects? How do we turn them into a sales asset that we can leverage on folks who are on the fence about doing business with us?
That’s what we sat down with Ross Trampler, VP of Sales for Teslio, to learn. He’s a former Army officer and practitioner of sales systems. He understands that our current clients can often be the best source of up to date dales intelligence that, properly leveraged, can help us convert new prospects much more efficiently.
Since we’re trimming hope from our sales strategy, we’ll use the acronym TRIM to guide us through creating a system with a trigger, ensuring it’s repeatable, building in ways to improve it, and of course, ensuring it’s measurable and getting us results.
T – Trigger: To launch a system that allows us to learn from current clients to accelerate our prospecting, Ross recommends first defining the data we need to begin tracking from current customers.
This means having a checklist of the key information to gather from customers so we don’t rely on hoping we remember to ask for it. The types of data Ross has his team compile:
-What were the specific requests the customer made when they reached out (in the case of inbound leads)
-What specific service did we sell them?
-What was the desired end state of the customer when they reached out?
-What ROI did they achieve, and how long did it take for them to achieve it?
-What made you want to work with us?
R – Repeatable: Once we’ve defined the types of information we want to begin gathering as part of our system, we need a set of steps we can repeatedly use in order to not only gather the data we need, but ensure it’s used in the prospecting process.
Too much data is gathered across sales teams that’s never used again, and we want to ensure this system produces results.
Ross says the basic steps of a system like this are based on accountability across verticals in your company. That means asking the service delivery folks and marketing team what they’re seeing among our customers as they deliver the product or services we sell. We have to hold each other accountable, Ross says, to sharing information with each other through scheduled review sessions across departments.
Ensure that when you notice something change in the data you’re gathering that you’re updating your outreach scripts, email templates, videos, text messages, and everything else that’s client-facing. That way you’ll ensure that executing this system means change will be created in the way your salespeople are conducting outreach.
I – Improvable: Ross says that improving a system like this means analyzing and reflecting on the information you’re gathering is critical to ensuring your system doesn’t become outdated.
That means defining criteria early on that will give the entire team a way to know if the information you’re gathering and using are moving prospects through your pipeline, or not making enough of an impact to matter.
M – Measurable: Measuring how well this information loop works, Ross says, means tracking the initial touchpoints of prospecting results. Are your prospects opening emails more than they were before? Are you driving meetings faster? Are folks returning your calls because your voicemail messages are more impactful?
That depends, or course, on knowing what your metrics were before this system.
Creating a value loop between your existing customers and new prospects is one of the most valuable ways you can leverage what’s working and eliminate what’s not – not by guessing, but by taking your customer’s word for it.