How Do You Grow a Business Without a Sales Team?
If you’re a senior partner or executive at your organization you’re probably responsible for bringing in new clients. If it’s your own business you might be the only reason your company has gotten to where it is. It’s exhausting, right?
Not every senior person in a business is a rainmaker. In fact, so many of the people I work with tell me they love what they do, but ‘selling’ doesn’t come naturally.
Even if you are a relationship-drive connector, you have too much to do to be solely responsible for growth.
Three Ways to Grow Without a Sales Team
There are three ways:
Find new clients
Buy new clients
Do more with current clients
Which one is the fastest and the easiest? If you’re not already maximizing the lifetime value of your existing clients, you’re missing a trick.
In our FOMO world acquiring new clients is seen as sexier somehow. And you DO need to have a strategic plan for acquiring new clients, even if that’s not your wheelhouse, because attrition is real. (Stay tuned for an easier way to do this in next week’s post.)
Buying new clients through an acquisition is a strategy that will work for some, but isn’t the right answer for everyone.
Maximizing Client Lifetime Value is Cheaper and Easier
The cheapest and easiest way is to do more with existing clients. Easy, peasy, right?
Well, yes, actually.
When you teach your client-facing team, whoever they might be in your organization, how to cultivate and deepen relationships with existing clients and how to identify opportunities for additional ways to serve those clients, growth is the inevitable result.
I’m not talking about upselling and cross-selling - clients get annoyed when you do that. I’m talking about listening, deep service, and going the extra mile. It’s amazing how often the little things lead to better retention, true loyalty and more business, and they don’t cost much.
You and your partners can’t be everywhere all at once. But you can give your account teams the authority and support to ask the kinds of questions that lead to additional opportunities. You can define a process for what to do next. And you can all be involved in ensuring that your clients are served so well when a new point of contact comes in you don’t need to be worried that you’ll be ‘reviewed’.