And they’re important.  No revenue growth plan is complete without a full frontal attack on targeted, profitable, sizable new customers.  Isolating the best opportunities, creating acquisition strategies and evolving a targeted prospect into a happy customer is the backbone of a long-term success strategy.  Motivating and mobilizing the entire organization around these large scale targeted opportunities can elevate a sales organization from mediocre to massive performance and gets lots of attention from managers, executives, and stockholders.  No bones about it, new clients matter.

But here’s the best kept secret in the world.  For existing businesses in established markets, the fastest, cheapest, largest and most profitable revenue growth doesn’t actually come from new clients.  This deserves repeating.   Unless you’ve just invented some whiz-bang product, are working in a start-up, or are introducing a product to a totally new channel, your biggest, best, and highest impact revenue growth comes from people you already sell stuff to.  It comes from the customers we have long term relationships with, already like our company, and know our brand.  They have a good payment history, multiple connections inside our organization, and appreciate our products/services.  So if they love us so much, what’s the catch?  The problem is this:  unfortunately, they feel the same exact way about our competition.

Existing clients, especially the big ones, cheat on us.  They have multiple vendors, yet we think we’re special.  They have different types of needs which require different solutions, but we think they buy on price.  They try to manage their business risk buy spreading some of their business around, then we think they’re disloyal.  Lots of assumptions and ginormous dollars left on the table.

Since our existing customers are already tied into our systems, processes, services, and procedures, sometimes growing our share with them is as simple as asking.  What could we do to earn more business?  Who else do they use and why?  Why is that important?  What business issues are they working to solve in the next 90 days?  How does our product, service or expertise relate to their solutions?  These kinds of questions have a real advantage with customers we know well since we can often add value to the conversation from our experiences, observations and layered internal relationships.  Additionally, clients we have a deep relationship with are more apt to share information openly, candidly and abundantly.  This allows us to use meaningful questions to figure out how to add more value and differentiate us from our competition, calling in the resources we find we need as a result of our conversations and the long standing relationships the client already has with our company.

Often, getting a much bigger share of a customer’s business only requires a simple solve.  Sometimes the only thing lacking is that we haven’t asked.  Business relationships, like some marriages, get a little, well, stale.  Over time, we tend to be less likely to ask questions, far less curious about what our partner thinks and feels, and make a few too many assumptions.  If this lasts for years, it can lead to a meltdown – lots of hurt feelings, resentment, and even divorce.  Couples who avoid this often work hard to keep interest in each other, have meaningful conversations, and develop shared interests other than their children.  Couples who last are disciplined. They make “working on the relationship” a priority and know that effort is required to keep each other interested.

Business relationships are a lot like marriages without the monogamy.  Our customers can have a spouse (us) and a few significant others.  We may get mad, we may get jealous, we may have hurt feelings, but we can’t really control their behavior.  The only thing we can do is be proactive about continuing to nurture, grow, evolve, and develop the relationship.  Some sales people use account planning – a process where they tailor an in-depth, focused, written and accountable set of activities designed to foster business results to each existing customer’s needs.  Others take a more casual and less systematic approach, checking in with major decision makers at regular intervals and looking for meaningful reasons to reach out on a periodic basis.  Whatever approach we take, it should be proactive and consistent – aimed at uncovering new areas of opportunity and learning about the customer’s current and future efforts, goals and challenges.  So just like a rock solid marriage, we’ve got to stay interested, attentive, and focused on developing the relationship.

Remember, if you aren’t interested in your clients, someone at your competition is.  Sometimes, by the time we notice a customer has chosen another company, it’s too late to do anything about it.  If we get a little too comfortable and aren’t on our game, one of our competitor’s sales people – who’s just a little hungrier and interested – can get a toehold with our best clients.  Keeping in close contact and making time for business conversation is the surest way to fan off competitors.  This doesn’t include social interactions like golfing, lunches or other “business-ish” events.  Those are important, but it’s the type of conversation and information exchange that keeps and grows clients, not just social relationships.  If we want to build moats around our customers, we have to deepen the quality of our understanding of their needs and constantly create solutions – not just be their friends.  Personal relationships make it fun, business relationships make it profitable.  Having both is a wonderful by-product.

Focusing attention on the highest value, greatest upside existing clients would be like having a dollar bill in your wallet suddenly give birth to lots of other dollar bills – it’s shockingly surprising, instantaneous, simple, and requires minor amounts of intervention on your part.  Just be sure if your currency is suddenly birthing that it’s a Benjamin Franklin rather than a George Washington.  Focus on the high yield customers and your wallet will grow accordingly.

About one year later, Brian was standing on my front porch at 8:05pm, in the dark and cold of a February evening, nervously eyeing my growling Great Dane with a smile on his face and eventually convincing me to part with $360 for magazines I neither need nor want.  His commission from this sale (65%) was $234 which helps to explain why he’s earning an average of $1,200 per week going door to door.  Brian is an unbelievable sales person.  He asked questions in a practiced (but still casual) way.  Before ten minutes passed, he was asking for the business, upselling me into other products, and increasing the length of each subscription by continuing the dialogue.  Admittedly, I’m a sucker for a good sales person and complete milquetoast for a great one.  I have to protect myself from sales people because I will spend money to reward someone I learn something from.  That all being said, the fact that a kid from the hood with a rap sheet, a middle school education, and a newly overcome addiction had the kind of game this young man displayed gives me hope for our whole society.  The observation that sales skills can be taught, honed, and practically perfected over the course of a very short period of time sends a powerful message…if he can do it, why do so many people with lots of advantages, education, and experiences struggle to gain marginal sales skills?

One of the key ingredients, and one you can’t manufacture, is desire for success.  Brian may have a lot of challenges but his drive pushes him to learn new things, suffer the cold and the elements, and regularly/consistently get yelled at/barked at/kicked out/flung aside just to sell a few magazines.  There are probably lots of lessons one could draw from this story – the one that applies to most of us seems to be simply this:  to get better at sales, pick a sales process, surrender to it and learn it well, and make consistent sales calls.  Everything else is just stuff.  Some of that stuff is important…most of it has nothing to do with sales.

When you examine Brian’s approach, his success really boils down to these three simple concepts:

1. Choose a systematic approach to sales – one that is simple, easy to understand, and relates to your product or service.  Don’t spend time convincing yourself the system won’t work – it will.  Just like the radio in your car, it has to be ON to function.  Turn the system on and get your fears, doubts, concerns, critiques out of the way.
2. Practice.  Somewhere along the way, we forget that anything we want to improve requires consistent and intentional practice.  From what I’ve seen in my career, the sales people with all the gold have a practice routine, even if they’ve been at it since the Mesozoic era.  Find ways to respond to objections, hone your closing and relationship definition skills, value statements, questioning skills in your spare time when the stakes are low.  Make flash cards that you can use throughout the course of your day.  Ask your spouse or significant other to quiz you – you can be just like Inspector Clouseau of Pink Panther fame who had his assistant Cato attack him at random to improve his self-defense skills.  Just don’t hurt yourself.  A little effort here will go a long way…get serious about your practice and the sales will follow.
3. Increase your consistency.  Brian hits 35-60 doors a day, every single day.  He’s learned the numbers matter and the more doors he hits the more money he earns.  As we progress in our sales careers, we let things get in the way of our sales time.  Can you imagine how your sales would increase if you spent even half as much time as Brian knocking on doors?  Figure out a consistent, daily sales regimen you can commit to – and make it as important as your coffee in the morning or your mealtimes.  You wouldn’t think of starting the day without your coffee (tea, diet Coke, whatever) right?  So why would you let your sales day progress without a routine of its own?  Create a commitment to sales consistency and watch the results soar.

Brian Savage overcame his circumstances, poverty, addiction, homelessness and a lack of education through the acquisition and implementation of an impressive set of sales skills.  Can you overcome the obstacles you put in your own way to do the same?

Strangely, the amount of sales activity is the most important factor, while the quality of that activity is a distant second.  This becomes really apparent when a “new” sales person – with little to no experience or contacts in your industry – joins your sales team and blows the doors off of long term players.  It is mind boggling how many times a territory has languished in apparent agony under the efforts of a revolving door of professionals who couldn’t seem to light a campfire when a brand new person with virtually no skills comes in and ignites an inferno.  How do they do it?  They make more sales calls on a daily basis than anyone else.  They do it systematically and religiously, even if they do it poorly.

Implementing a system that produces mediocre or poor quality in abundant quantity seems like a really bad idea.  Until you think about businesses that do mediocre really well – McDonalds comes to mind as one example.  I know some people like the taste of a Big Mac, most of them are under 18 or moderately intoxicated, yet most of us would agree that the flavor and the quality aren’t all that terrific.  The trick is consistency. Reliability outweighs the downside quality – we aren’t looking for gourmet fare when we mow a Quarter Pounder, just a cheap product we can count on.  Another example is Southwest airlines.  Want an assigned seat?  No go.  Food?  Nope.  Clean plane?  Depends on how quick the turn time is.  But if you want to get from point A to point B in the Southwestern region of the US with the most options and a great safety record, Southwest is your choice.  The quality of the experience might be low, but the consistency and quantity is high.

Which leads us back to salespeople.  When a senior sales executive calls me and asks for my help building sales results, they usually have one of two common solutions in mind.  First, they believe the antidote to lackluster sales results is sales training.  Intuitively, this makes sense – if you want to improve performance, you enhance skills, right?  Wrong.  Unfortunately, rolling out sales training usually misses the more important point – sales skills only benefit a sales person if that sales person is making enough sales calls to actively work on their skills.  Sales training is a lot like taking a class in Microsoft Excel – it only makes a difference if the training is applied immediately and consistently.  Anyone who has ever taken a software class and then promptly not logged into the software for a couple of weeks after the class knows this all too well – pretty much everything has leaked out of that tightly packed bundle of goo inside your head and you’re back where you began.

Changing compensation is another common cure sales executives order up for sales teams struggling to perform.  If I had $50 for every time someone said to me “put the cheese where you want the mouse to go,” or its corollary, “pay for the behavior you want,” I’d be Donald Trump (minus the hair thing.)  Compensation can be part of the problem, but usually not the most important part.  Typically, the way a sales force is structured and the requirements of each position need to be refined, then the talent needs to be assessed in the context of those refinements before a compensation change can have any positive impact.    Just like you wouldn’t choose to saddle up your Ferrari to pull your trailer, you probably don’t want an account manager charged with cold calling senior level executives.  Each position requires a different type of skills and talents; matching those requirements to the right strengths is key to success, just like you’re more likely to pull your Airstream with your F250.

Since neither sales training or changing compensation is usually the right first solution to a salesforce’s lackluster performance, what is?   Two words:  Focused activity.  What goals and activities do the sales people strive to achieve every day?  Are those goals and activities in alignment?  Are the objectives simple, tangible and explicitly clear?  Are sales people working on focused activity every single day?  In virtually every struggling sales organization, the answer to these questions is either “no” or “not really.”  For goals to be powerful and to drive the right behavior, they have to be both results and activity focused.  Many of the sales plans I’ve seen talk about desired financial outcomes but miss the highest value activity milestones which lead to results.  It’s not enough to outline revenue, market share, dollar expansion or other financial metrics without stating objectives which coincide to the most meaningful parts of the sales cycle.  Activity goals vary with your industry but examples include # of meetings with decision makers, # of leads generated, # of contracts issued etc.  Isolating the fewest component parts of the sales cycle which are most correlated to revenue results and developing monthly goals around those components get sales people clearly focused on the most important aspect of their performance:  what they choose to do every day.

For individual sales people, as well as 12 step program participants, each and every day is a battle.  Temptations, distractions, emergencies, and other time villains suck sales people away from the activity required to win every day.  Slaying these foes in a quest to stick to a daily sales plan which drives the highest value parts of the sales cycle determines an individual sales person’s success.  The sales person who focuses on executing a daily activity plan and ignores distractions is going to hit goal.

Sales leaders can help by watching their sales team’s pipeline and intervening early when sales cycle milestones aren’t being achieved.  In most cases, sales people who are behind their plan have fallen off the activity wagon – assuming the plan was reasonable in the first place.  The best intervention strategy starts with a discussion focused on how the sales person spent their day.  Who did they call?  Why? Who did they visit?  Why?  How would they have improved the quality of their sales day?  What gets in the way?  How can they handle those distractions in the future?  Make no mistake, asking these questions can be pretty infuriating since it’s so much easier to either a: not make the time for the conversation at all or, b:  just tell them what they should be doing.  Unfortunately, neither of these approaches work.  Helping a sales person to see the value of their time and helping them think about priorities from inside their own cranium is the most powerful way to get them on the right course.  It usually takes a number of conversations and a few ride time days (where the sales leader joins the sales person on a full day of calls and other mayhem) to help a sales person who is stuck in lower value activity to see the light.  Eventually, with a little patience, persistence and the right approach – questions and inquiry rather than statements and “guidance” – sales people get on the path of properly focused activity.   And like a magic trick, great sales results appear from thin air.