Yes! You Need to Close.
You’ve done all you can to provide the best possible customer experience. You have a terrific customer success team and you regularly communicate with all of your customers to offer help and suggestions – without being too sales or spammy.
Throughout the year, you’ve kept your customer success and your renewal sales team talking and working together so you know who is really using all the features, who might be needing something with a bit more horsepower (or less) and you’ve shared stories with your customers about others who’ve had success using different features or solving different problems.
At least 120 days out from your annual deadline, your renewal sales team has executed a contact plan that has intelligently added voicemail messages to your email reminders because this is no time to risk emails being ignored. A goodly portion of your renewing customers have let you know that “Yes” they plan to renew.
So don’t screw it all up now by just sending out the bills and crossing your fingers that the money will come rolling in. Some will, but not enough. This is the time for your sales team to directly engage with your renewing customers and close the deal! Better yet, wherever there is an opportunity, this is when your sales team truly pays for themselves by up selling and cross selling your renewing customers.
I worked with a company once who made the mistake of backing off the customers as soon as they agreed to renew. The reps never really closed the sales and even worse, since each sales group handled a distinct product, intra departmental conflicts precluded any attempt to up sell or cross sell and each sales team jealously guarded their client rosters. If you don’t believe I don’t blame you, because this is crazy talk. But it’s true never-the-less.
Book appointments. Your customers deserve that much respect for their time from you. Take the opportunity for your sales team to deliberately review their business needs. Look at changes that have happened in the last year. Look at new opportunities on the horizon. Somewhere along the line, you probably told your clients about how you didn’t just want to take their money, you wanted to be their partners. Make good on your promise to add some value.
Even the best-managed companies are going to lose some customers every year and the bigger you grow, the harder it is to replace the customers who churn out. So, employ every possible defensive strategy and the rock solid close, the up sell and the cross sell are among the best defenses. It only takes a small increase to make a big difference.
Yes. If you’re thinking that you can’t possibly do this for business that renews every month, you’re right. For larger sales or multiuser licenses, think about how often you can sensibly re-engage and create the “new close” opportunity