Problem: Maintaining customer relationships after a sale
A lot of people are great at sales. Convincing individuals of their product or service’s quality and usefulness comes naturally, and they’re able to make quick connections and close a sale with ease.
However, once you get a customer in the door, the relationship can’t end there– not if you’d like to maintain good customer relationships. A lot of salespeople don’t know how to do this. Many professionals in the sales field experience this, so if you’re facing this problem, you’re not alone. Training for a sales position doesn’t always teach you about maintaining customer relationships— and salespeople are so hyper-focused on actually making a sale that building a seller-customer relationship doesn’t come naturally. These relationships are nevertheless important; and they are the key to maintaining loyal, repeat customers.
Customer loyalty is very important to any business. Loyal customers will always come back to your business and they will also advertise your business to their family and friends. You can only get a loyal customer by offering great services, quality products and above all have a relationship with them before and after a sale.
Patterns
A customer will come back to your business if he or she feels well treated by your team. If you treat your customers well, offer them great service, listen to them and give them solutions to their problems they will always come back. To convert a walk-in customer to a loyal customer you need to offer them something they do not easily get from other businesses. Therefore, having a good relationship with your customers will enable you to create more loyal customers.
People tend to associate themselves with a business that treats them well, are customer-oriented and above all offer value for money. Do not be surprised when you see that certain customers tend to go to a certain business yet there are similar businesses offering the same product around. There must be something that the owner or the manager of that particular business is doing that the others are not doing.
Solutions to this problem in sales
A loyal customer is a happy customer and if you want to have a loyal customer. The key is to keep your customers happy. The problem then becomes: how can you manage to do this?
Regularly check in with your customers
After making a sale, it is a good idea to regularly check in with your customers to ask them about their experience using the product or service you sold them. Ask them if they’re happy with their purchase, if they’re running into any problems, and what you can do to help them out.
Demonstrates clearly that your relationship hasn’t ended just because they’ve signed a check– your customers will be willing to share what their experience has been like, and their satisfaction with your company as a whole will increase.
Take advantage of marketing automation
You can use marketing automation systems to keep track of your customer’s engagement levels and buying behaviour. This will enable you to send them personalized emails, attract more traffic, and even boost your sales.
Offer after sales services
If you are selling machines, equipment and electronic gadgets, you can offer your customers after-sales service. By doing so you will be establishing trust and reliability with them. This will create loyalty among your customers and they will always come back for more services or products.
Nurture your current clients
When you offer quality customer service to your clients, you will be nurturing them to become more than just customers. You will be creating a relationship with them and they will invest in your brand. This will make it easier for you to upsell a happy customer.
Do not just focus on making money at the expense of building lasting relationships with your customers. Maintain strong relationships with all your customers and you will have loyal customers.
If this is a problem in your organization, you can create a Sales Department OKR to improve after-sales customer relationships. OKRs– Objectives and Key Results— are a goal-setting framework that frames your qualitative goals in quantifiable, metric-based terms so you can make more progress, even on your most ambitious targets. Setting an OKR to help with customer relationships directs focus, effort, and resources to fulfilling this goal, and can help you transform your company’s reputation and the outlook of your sales representatives.