Making your clients stick around after your salesmen leave

A beautiful sunny day. Birds are singing. The Coffee smells better than usual this morning. Business is booming. All existing clients are satisfied.

Since it’s all looking bright, and I’m in a good mood, I’m going to take my best salesman to lunch today. We should discuss how to ride this “good business climate wave”. After all, all the business books claim that it’s no time to stop when things are looking up. On the contrary: “Hey Mark, are you free for lunch today? I want us to discuss some new ideas and steps we should take to get new clients.”
Mark responds: “Sure, we can go to lunch, no problem. I wanted to talk to you about something anyways.”
A cold sweat started to drench my face. I knew immediately something was wrong from the tone he used. I know him well. After all, he’s been working here for the past twenty years. Mark is leaving our company.

The problem of pivotal people leaving

Before we get ahead of ourselves, a CRM can’t help you stop people from leaving. In fact, nothing can. When a person firmly decides they need a change, there’s not much left you can do. In addition, good sales personnel for complex B2B solutions are scarce, and the demand is growing.

“Why do I need a CRM, then?” you might ask yourself. Well, it’s simple. To be prepared if the previously described situation happens to you. And it’s not even the question of “if” but “when”.

Salesmen leaving ≠ Clients leaving

The main goal is that your clients don’t follow them through that proverbial door when your saleswomen or salesmen leave. Sure, it’s not easy to make up for a human-to-human relationship. Still, with proper use of a CRM, a “new human” on your side will create a new, equally good business relationship and make your clients stay. You can do that by using Customer 360.
Throughout the relationship between your salespeople and your clients, they exchange some information:

• What is essential for them
• What was their last meeting about
• What were they talking about during a call on a specific date
• Their needs
• Even their birthdays and important dates

The point is that proper track keeping about communication can significantly help the new person (and, by extension, your company) manage, adapt and get used to the newly assigned clients. Further on, your employee’s job is challenging enough as it is. Using a quality platform can ease up the work for your sales and make their workplace a happier place. For example, with Salesforce‘s Sales Cloud, your sales department will:

• Manage clients more easily
• Automate repetitive tasks
• Make better predictions
• Raise efficiency
• Accelerate deals
• ….

About CRM market

The CRM market is highly fragmented. What that means is that there is a large number of quality—solutions which will ensure control over marketing processes, sales and customer support. Read more about it in this report. But, the important thing to emphasize here is that Salesforce holds over 20% market share. That is 4 or 5 times more than its first competitor. From a car manufacturers’ industry perspective, it’s about the common market share of Toyota and Volkswagen. You can check that statement about Salesforce here.

Why should you choose Salesforce?

There are a couple of reasons why Salesforce holds such a significant market share, and it’s clever thinking not to disregard them:

• All data and interactions with your clients are stored away in your Salesforce system. Safely hidden from wandering glances, but still simple to browse and use at any given moment
• Increased productivity, automatization of repetitive tasks, and unbelievable ease of use with faster onboarding and more time to build quality relationships with your clients
• Salesforce will also transform the processes of your sales reps using the best world practices, such as specialization of sales roles in the front and back office. This transformation will enable you to find new (and better) prospects more easily with the more efficient use of up-sell and cross-sell with the existing clients

And don’t worry. I didn’t read all of this from the Salesforce product page. At HSM, we’re using Salesforce ourselves. So we deeply understand the business processes usually conducted by any CRM. Even more so, we’re providing consulting and implementation services of Salesforce. So because of all that, the story from the beginning of the text, for me, now goes differently.

Clients of companies that use Salesforce are here to stay

A beautiful sunny day. Birds are singing. Business is booming. The Coffee smells better than usual this morning.

Since it’s all looking bright, and I’m in a good mood, I’m going to take my best salesman to lunch today. We should discuss how to ride this “good business climate wave”. After all, all the business books claim that it’s no time to stop when things are looking up. On the contrary: “Hey Mark, are you free for lunch today? I want us to discuss some new ideas and steps we should take to get new clients.”
Mark responds: “Sure, we can go to lunch, no problem. I wanted to talk to you about something anyways.”

At that moment, I knew my best salesman was leaving, but that was fine. We will use this lunch as an opportunity to have a proper goodbye. That’s the least I can do after 20 years. As for the company, yes, he will be missed, but our clients and we are on the safe side. We’re using Salesforce, after all.