Simple Sales Strategy

Listen to the customer. Understanding consumer needs and perceptions is the key to good strategic customer planning. Good companies will use both simple (point of service response cards) and sophisticated (customer focus groups) methods to find ways to improve their products and services in ways that are desired by customers.

Assess the competition’s market position, plans and strength. Competition has increased so much that achieving continuous improvement and exceeding customers’ expectations no longer assures faster-than-market growth in profits. It is the underlying strategy that will lead to sustainable competitive advantage. Accelerated profitable growth requires strategic cross-selling of the company’s transportation services (that the customer perceives are needed).

Stress Account Retention. Concentrate on how to be a preferred vendor and more profitable. As the relationship matures into the retention phase, the account becomes very profitable if it is retained. Sales and service costs drop because the customer and vendor know how to work with one another. If the account is lost, the profit stream stops. If the account was a fairly new one, the acquisition cost might not even be recovered. Customer satisfaction leads to customer retention, which provides the opportunity for account dominance or primacy. The long-term primary supplier typically gets higher realized prices. This may not be much as a percentage of sales, but it goes right to the bottom line. The preferred vendor also tends to have the ability to take a richer product mix with higher profit margins.

The salesperson plays a critical profit-generation role either in negotiating individually or in providing the information upon which headquarters-level executives make pricing decisions. In either case, diagnostic, consultative sales techniques are necessary to determine the customer’s needs. Pricing decisions are often clouded by customer threats and competitive activity.

The sales force, more than any other function, is responsible for profit-generation. If it falls down by choosing the wrong accounts, makes promises that can’t be kept, poorly manages the accounts or neglects its customer liaison role, the profit machine falls apart.

Productive salespeople often make the difference between company success and failure.