In this final installment in the series on building your spiral pipeline for sales and prospecting, let’s look at the third step: creating growth opportunities.
This Growth step is the culmination of the work you need to do to propel your organization forward with steadily growing sales—no matter what the economic conditions are like for your competition.
As I explained earlier in this series, it’s important to keep a steady inflow of leads and stay engaged with clients even after each sale closes. When you get that right, you create the ideal conditions for generating new growth. Here’s why: because the client who benefits from your extra efforts is also the client who will be much more open to upselling, and to seeing the added value of doing more business with you.
Unlock your secret sales force
Creating a great buying experience becomes a magnetic force that draws in your best customers and compels them to tell others about you.
In effect, they become new recruits in your secret sales force: one that helps sell you to new prospects, creates new customers and adds new segments to your ever-growing spiral pipeline. Always capture these success stories. You can use them not only to sell more to your existing customers but to help you attract new prospects as well. Not a bad return for a little bit of extra work.
Uncovering new value
Growth opportunities can scale beyond selling customers on new products and services. You can also demonstrate to your clients how they can squeeze even more value from the products/services you’ve already sold to them. When you do that, your chances for selling more to this client in the future improves.
For example, I work with a client who sells large contracts to financial services firms. When a business involves multi-million dollar contracts, it tends to have plenty of competitors looking to carve off a piece for themselves.
Rather than give that up to others, this client worked with us at Engage to uncover deeper value and provide more service to their current customer. Together, we found an area in the business so under-serviced that the client was only using a tenth of its full potential. In other words, the client was only using 10 per cent of the “functions” of the products they already owned! In fact, during our discovery the executive said to me directly “Colleen, it’s like we bought a DVD player but they only thing we know how to do is hit play!”
Without adding any cost to their customer, we suggested a solution that helped them boost the value of what they’d already sold. In other words, we taught them to record, fast forward and rewind! This led to improved customer loyalty and increased the leverage our client had on new business with their client in the future.
It’s all about community
Throughout this series, we’ve talked about what it takes to build your spiral pipeline. Beyond methodical steps, what this is really about is building a community where you help make a difference in the lives of your customers. In turn, they help you to grow your business.
Remember that growth doesn’t happen unless you’ve made a difference to your clients!
Communities blossom where trust is earned and added value is revealed steadily. They are the glue that binds our networking efforts. Work hard to achieve this and your spiral pipeline will reward you many times over with steadily upward tracking sales.