Written by The most important task for any sales organization is to retain its customer base. In an on-demand economy, where customers are increasingly becoming more demanding and pickier about the products they buy and use, customer retention has never been harder or more critical.
In the short run, it’s all about customer satisfaction. This boils down to things like timely and accurate delivery and implementation of products, dedicated account representatives, and responsive customer service when problems arise, and a quick resolution process.
Long-term retention hinges on building up customers’ trust in your company’s ability to provide them with high-quality service over time without interruption. In other words, you want customers who are so satisfied that they don’t need to look elsewhere…ever! It can take years for some companies to reach this level of loyalty but there are customer retention strategies every business owner can implement today.
4 Powerful Enterprise Sales Customer Retention Strategies:
- Stellar Customer Experience
- Listen to Your Customers
- Align Your Incentives
- Offer Rewards for Referrals
Stellar Customer Experience
When it comes to enterprise sales, we find that companies experience a high churn rate because of two reasons: (i) there may not be enough resources allocated to address all the needs of each individual customer; (ii) when hiring new staff members, oftentimes priority is given to selling rather than servicing existing customers. For this reason, company leaders need to look no further than improving customer service before starting other initiatives in order to mitigate risk. One of the best ways for companies to do this is through business value consulting.
As enterprise leaders know, their customers are looking for more than just a product or service – they need help with solving problems and finding new opportunities that will benefit the company as well. Business Value Consultants work with customers to identify where improvements can be made both tactically and strategically across the organization in order to maximize customer satisfaction, and, therefore, customer retention. These consultants analyze data from all levels of the client base and provide recommendations aimed at improving profitability, reducing costs associated with churn, developing processes that eliminate bottlenecks within operational teams, aligning strategy with execution, etc.
Listen to Your Customers
The best way to build a relationship with your customers is by listening. This can be done through feedback and developing new products or services based on the customer’s requests. A simple method, such as submitting ideas in an online form, ensures that everyone has been heard no matter how small their idea may seem at first glance.
The most successful brands are those who listen to what they have to say; this means both adapting their current product line according to suggestions but also providing more insight into future company goals whenever possible for something you might not think about until it’s too late!
Align Your Incentives
Sales teams, by their nature, can have a different focus than customer retention. It’s important to align priorities and incentives in enterprise sales organizations when long-term success is the goal. One way to do this is through business value consulting- working with customers on ways to improve operations within an enterprise context.
The first step for enterprise executives should be evaluating organizational commitment to achieving these goals internally as well as externally (e.g., competitive differentiation). A wide variety of tools are available that enable companies to increase market share while maximizing profitability over time.
Offer Rewards for Referrals
You may be familiar with the Net Promoter Score (NPS). Many companies use this valuable metric to measure the success of their product or service in a quantitative manner. This KPI is used as an indicator of how likely customers are to recommend your products, which gives you insight into customer satisfaction. Remember that just like happy customers will refer you, unhappy customers will share their feelings even more loudly.
Referral incentives are a great way to reward your customers for recommending your company, and they can be used in all sorts of ways. Making referral rewards something tangible helps to incentivize future referrals and builds customer loyalty from the beginning.
Additionally, it’s often more challenging to get new leads than it is to maintain existing ones — so if you want more people coming into contact with your product or service, then you need an effective system that encourages word-of-mouth marketing within your current base of clients. This is where referral bonuses come in handy! A bonus will help minimize time spent trying to find someone new and it will also create a more measurable metric for success.
The idea is to reward your customers when they refer somebody else, but there are several ways you can do so:
-Referral upgrade – Help loyal customers move up to a higher level of your product by giving them an incentive to upgrade within a certain timeframe. If someone has been using basic software since 2011, now might be a good opportunity for them to take advantage of some higher value or increased customer service.
-Referral upgrade + referral bonus – If you want a more substantial return on investment, this is the route for you. When someone refers their contacts and one team upgrades within 30 days, then both parties receive an incentive of some kind.
Now, what is the right kind of incentive to offer? That depends on your customer.
These are just two examples, but the most important thing you can do is to understand what is of most value to your customers. By bringing in someone like a Business Value Consultant, you can identify what will be the best incentive to your customers, and offer them that. Don’t waste time offering incentives or credits that your customers won’t care about. Focus on their needs and what they can use for future success. Utilize an expert who can connect with their value-based needs and quantify that for them in a major incentive (while keeping it massively profitable for you), and you’ll undoubtedly see an increase in your customer retention.
Your Customer Retention Strategy
Business Value Consulting is a key element in creating a customer retention strategy. In this blog post, we’ve covered four points that will help increase your revenue and grow your business long term.
By implementing these strategies into the way you do business now, not only can you retain customers for longer but also gain new ones as they see how much effort you put into making them happy.