This is the seventh post in a series called “Lifecycle Management – what’s in it for me?”, which shows how to audit and transform your process at every stage of the sales cycle.
Link to the first article – Introduction
Link to the second article – Prospect or Suspect Stage
Link to the third article – Lead Stage
Link to the fourth article – Opportunity Stage
Link to the fifth article – Closed-Won 🙂
Link to the sixth article – Closed-Lost 🙁
Today, we will cover the final stage of the sales process – marking accounts for “Re-Win” or “Renewal,” depending on the outcome of the previous steps. Connected to the “Renewal” step will also be future up-sell and cross-sell opportunity identification.
Re-Win and Renewal
Whether you lost an Opportunity to a competitor or you won the Opportunity for yourselves, the time will come when that business will be up for renewal. You probably have excellent focus on renewing current business – the old adage that it costs 5-7x the amount of money to win new business than it does to retain a current customer is front and center here. Renewals and re-wins can both benefit from automation initiating the conversations, returning more time to your busy business development team so they can focus on closing new Opportunities.
Re-win/Renewal Opportunity Number 8 for Automation – Cross-selling and automated renewal emails
Get ahead of the game and utilize automation to contact customers 6-9 months from the time an Opportunity was closed/lost or closed/won. A different tone is required for each, but the goal is the same: to re-engage the customer and position you as their preferred choice in their next buying cycle.
With automation executing the initial steps, it can gauge a customer’s interest in a new discussion, create a new Lead in your CRM, assign an appropriate Lead Owner, and notify the right business development representative to engage when appropriate.
Anytime you can conduct communications with automation, you should leverage it. Cross-selling additional products or services is one of those times. Based on the study of previous customer buying patterns and behaviors, you may have a degree of certainty that a customer purchasing product or service A typically benefits from product or service B. So, initiate that discussion automatically and engage your business development team when your customer shows interest. Similar Lead Scoring qualification parameters used early in the Sales Pipeline can be adapted here to save the attention of your business development team for when it matters most: when the consultative sell is required. HubSpot conducted a study that found companies using marketing automation see a 53% higher conversion rate compared to companies that don’t.
Let Measured Results Marketing transform your end-to-end sales pipeline process and return 15 hours per BDR back to your team so they can focus on revenue-generating activities instead of administration. Click here to learn more about MRM’s Revenue Operations Ecosystem™ and see if it is a good fit for your goals. You can also call us at 571-606-3106 or leave a comment on LinkedIn.
