An in-depth look at how strong relationships between customers and companies drive business growth and the risk of mistaking a customer to sales person relationship with a customer to company relationship.

1. 360 degree View
of the Customer
Relationship
for Business Growth
Business Growth ebook Series
Craig Klein
www.salesnexus.com

2. Table of Contents
Business Growth eBook Series
iii
Meet Your Hosts
v
Featured Sponsor—LeadFerret.com
360 degree View of the Customer Relationship for Business Growth
vii
1
LeadFerret’s Role in Business Growth
3
Customer Relationships
5
Define 360 degree Customer View
7
Access to Information Required for 360 degree Customer View
16
Customer Relationship Management (CRM)
18
Bringing it All Together
20
Next Steps
21
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3. Business Growth eBook Series
We want you to grow your business. It is really that simple.
In fact, we surround ourselves with companies who share our belief that when we help you grow your business, everyone wins. We believe that when we help you grow your business, we also help grow communities, families, employers and our customers.
We have created this series of eBooks—in conjunction with a webinar series—to help you expand opportunities for growth in your company. This is true even if you are not a SalesNexus customer…even if you use
one of our competitors…we want to share what we have found to be useful for business growth.
Many businesses have great products and a great team, yet still struggle to master the strategies and tactics
of connecting with their market, standing out from the competition and closing sales. Toward that goal, we
have assembled a team of experts to share the best of what they know really works. Nothing is held back or
saved only for those who are clients of our individual company. Each eBook is packed with practical steps
any business can take immediately without busting the budget.
Below you will find a list of eBooks and webinars in this series. While each eBook builds on what was presented in the eBooks earlier in the series, you can choose to take them in any order. However, we strongly
suggest you read the first eBook or attend that webinar to get an understanding of how the information fits
all together.
To Your Business Growth,
Craig Klein, CEO SalesNexus
www.salesnexus.com
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4. Business Growth Series
THE MAGIC 5
OF CONTENT BASED
EMAIL MARKETING
THAT DRIVES SALES
The Magic 5 of Content Based
Email Marketing that Drives Sales
Business Growth ebook Series
Held on January 16h, 2013
A simple 5 step process to create
on-going, automated email campaigns that engage your audience and identify highly
qualified prospects.
Craig Klein
www.salesnexus.com
How to Qualify Sales Leads and
Focus on Sales Growth that’s
Profitable
Held January 30th, 2013
An in-depth look at how to use
simple questioning techniques to determine if a sales
lead will purchase and the powerful impact of consistent
qualifying.
Building a Successful Marketing
and Sales Process by Identifying
Your Customer’s “Pain”
Held on January 23rd, 2013
An in-depth investigation of how to
identify the emotional circumstances that cause customers to buy from you, how to question prospects to diagnose their “pains” and build sales processes that win!
Manage a Sales Process of
Actions that Lead to Sales Growth
Held on February 6th, 2013
An in-depth look at what should
be measured in every sales process, how to set goals for and measure it and how to
manage sales people to achieve business growth.
360 degree View of the Customer
Relationship for Business Growth
The 4 Pillars of a Sales Messaging
Strategy that Drives Growth
Held on February 13th, 2013
An in-depth look at how strong
relationships between customers
and companies drive business growth and the risk of
mistaking a customer to sales person relationship with a
customer to company relationship.
Held on February 20th, 2013
How to communicate what your
products and services do for your
customers, get their attention and understand their
needs, with Michael Halper, author of “The Cold Calling
Equation”
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5. Meet Your Hosts
Craig Klein, CEO, SalesNexus.com
As CEO, Craig Klein leads a team that is on a mission to help your business grow. They accomplish this goal
by providing an online Customer Relationship Management (CRM) that is fully integrated with an email
marketing system. Klein brings more than 18 years sales executive and management experience to designing SalesNexus solutions.
SalesNexus is a different kind of CRM and email system for many reasons. Perhaps the most meaningful is
the company recognizes that one size will not fit all in business. Since key people of the company come from
a sales background, they know how to work with you to find unique solutions specific to you, your business
and your customers.
Thousands of sales teams from around the world have discovered that SalesNexus takes the hard work out
of selling. That way you can focus on the people part of serving your customers. They know that you enjoy
sales because you enjoy people. SalesNexus will maximize the time you spend establishing deep relationships with your best customers.
This team feels success when they make marketing and selling easier for you. That is why SalesNexus is
hosting this Business Growth series of webinars and eBooks
Don’t forget that SalesNexus offers a 30-day free trial of their program so you can try it out…look around…
ask questions to determine if it is the right fit for you. During the free trial period, you can also download
your choice of 500 business contacts—with email addresses—at no cost at all via LeadFerret.com. Learn
more about LeadFerret below.
www.salesnexus.com
Page v

6. Meet Your Hosts
Forrest Cassidy, CEO, LeadFerret.com
Lead Ferret is the world’s first 100% free business-to-business database with complete information. They
offer more than 10 million easily searchable B2B contacts—with emails—FREE.
In today’s business environment, it is critical that you use your time in the most time efficient manner possible. The objective of Lead Ferret is to make prospecting and generating leads easier for sales teams, recruiters, and small business owners.
The LeadFerret system allows you to spend less time prospecting and more time selling…and that leaves
more time to do the things you really love to do.
Learn more about Lead Ferret on a following page.
www.salesnexus.com
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7. Featured Sponsor—LeadFerret.com
Lead Ferret is a sales organization’s most
powerful source of new business. Like it says
on the Lead Ferret website, when you access
this service—it is like adding 10 million+ contacts to your address book. The database
contains complete information including
email addresses…and so much more. It’s free
to join, so go check it out.
Throughout this series, we will be showing
you how to use this contact information and
implement strategies for business growth in
an efficient, time-saving and highly professional manner.
If you are a SalesNexus user you can download 500 free contacts a month. You can even take advantage of
this free offer during the free trial on SalesNexus.
Since some people say that, “2 minutes on LeadFerret is worth 2 hours on LinkedIn.”— you should take a few
minutes to learn more.
Every record in LeadFerret is complete with company information, name, title, address and phone number.
You can search by SIC and NACIS codes. You can search by location in several ways, including a map tool.
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8. Featured Sponsor—LeadFerret.com
The methods we are showing you in this series will demonstrate how to use this robust interface to grow
your business. In the first eBook, you will learn how to identify your ideal prospect. You may have a geographical territory or there may be a size of business that fits well with your product/service. You can search
in terms of revenue range, industry, department within the company and the title of the individual you
should contact.
You simply plug the demographic details into the LeadFerret system. You get a list of target prospects to
download into SalesNexus. You have spent much less time finding the right type of person and can now
spend more time connecting with high quality prospects and building relationships.
It all fits together with one purpose—to Grow Your Business.
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9. 360 degree View
of the Customer
Relationship
for Business Growth

10. 360 degree View of the Customer Relationship for Business Growth
T
his eBook is fifth in a series called the Business Growth series. In the first eBook, we covered our Magic
5, content based email marketing process. In eBooks two and three we showed you how to build a successful sales process through identifying your customer’s pain and focusing on profitable sales growth by
qualifying prospects. In the fourth eBook we demonstrated how to manage sales process actions and grow
your business with accurate sales forecasting.
In this eBook, we will be talking about the 360 degree view of a customer relationship. Just like the information we shared in the first four eBooks, this is another piece of the business growth puzzle. We will cover four
primary areas of client relationships:
1. Core Elements of Customer Relationships
2. Key Goals in Business Growth
3. 360 degree Customer View
4. Low Cost Ways to Achieve 360 degree View
First, we need to review how it all fits together.
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11. 360 degree View of the Customer Relationship for Business Growth
LeadFerret’s Role in Business Growth
LeadFerret is a source for B2B contact information. It is a robust set of search tools that allow you to find
exactly the prospects you want. They include email addresses in every record and social media information
and links with a lot of the records.
You can find people based on their department, title or based on the size of the company. You can even drill
down to a specific company or specific contacts by title within a company. What is a little amazing is that
hundreds of thousands of people use it all for free. A premium service is offered for some subscribers, but
the majority of the users take advantage of the free service because you can see all the information online.
Everybody in any sales position would be crazy not to use Lead Ferret.
For SalesNexus subscribers, they can download 500 contacts into the CRM with just a few clicks—and it’s
free every month. You can even download 500 contact records during the trial period of SalesNexus. It is such
a ‘no-brainer’ for SalesNexus clients, a demo of LeadFerret has become a part of almost all demos or training.
When people see a list of hundreds or even thousands of highly targeted prospective customers quickly and
easily downloaded into the SalesNexus system, they will often ask, “What’s the catch?” Using this tool has
revolutionized the way sales can be increased and managed. In the old days, you would expect your sales
reps to use this valuable contact information to pick up the phone to cold call. Today, we are showing you a
much easier and cost effective way to use the contact data.
The Magic 5 Business Growth Process
Adapting your sales process to this model will lead to Business Growth. We can confidently make that
statement because it has been proven in a wide range of business types time after time. We saw it working
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12. 360 degree View of the Customer Relationship for Business Growth
for our clients and developed this series to share it with you. Once you understand how it all fits together,
you will find that it really is not hard.
Today’s buyer wants to remain in control of the
buying process and this model allows them to
direct every step along the way. This model
simply works. It also saves wasted time and
resources compared to the traditional ways of
selling.
The basic formula:
• Create 5 emails that focus on different
pains that your products and services
address. (Customer pain is covered in
depth in the second eBook of this series.)
• When people click on the links in the
emails to read those articles, it triggers
a sales response.
• When sales people call the people who have opened the links, they use a series of qualifying questions to determine if the prospect is ready to purchase soon or needs to be nurtured over time. (The
third eBook explains how to develop qualifying questions.)
• A second campaign using frequently asked questions (FAQ) is sent to those that don’t meet the criteria as a highly qualified buyer. These are based on questions that people typically ask before they
buy. It helps the prospect move toward a purchase.
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13. 360 degree View of the Customer Relationship for Business Growth
Customer Relationships
Establishing good customer relationships is very difficult and costly. In fact, most business energy is spent
on acquiring new customers or establishing new customer relationships. Because there is so much attention
paid to this aspect of a business, there is an imperative to maximize the revenue per customer.
Once you have acquired a customer, you want to make sure you
are selling them as much as you can. You also want to keep them
as long as you can. We’ve all heard the axiom that it’s much easier
to go back to your existing customers and sell them new products
and services than it is to acquire an entirely new customer. That
is true in virtually all businesses. That is why customer relationships are so valuable and important to business growth.
Universal Business Objectives
We want to win more customers.
We want to sell them more.
We want to keep them longer.
All of us wake up every day worrying about these things. The
question is whether you have systems in place to ensure that it really happens. For most companies, the
answer is “NO”. That’s unfortunate and it doesn’t need to be that way. This eBook is going to explain how to
implement systems for accomplishing those three objectives.
SalesNexus Leading by Example
You may have noticed a change in the SalesNexus branding this year. We are emphasizing our commitment
to our customers. This Business Growth Series is a small part of this new commitment. Everyone, at every
level of SalesNexus has a strong belief in the concept of free enterprise, entrepreneurship and the capitalist
society we enjoy. We believe that when businesses grow, everyone else benefits.
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14. 360 degree View of the Customer Relationship for Business Growth
We have made it our mission to focus on helping our customers grow their business because we believe
that’s going to help your employees live better lives. Their families will be stronger, more prosperous and
more secure.
Ultimately, we believe our client’s business growth helps communities. The communities of your customers
will be improved by your business growing. That’s our mission because we think it’s good for all of us.
We are explaining the change in focus to human relationships with the customers, prospects and other
people we come into contact with during the course of the day at SalesNexus. We want you to know about
it for a reason. It is a really great way to understand this 360 degree concept.
You want to know as much as you can about a person so you can have a real, genuine, authentic relationship
with them. We will dig into the concept on a business level in this eBook. When you have different people
involved with the customers you will need systems to be in place to support those relationships.
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15. 360 degree View of the Customer Relationship for Business Growth
Define 360 degree Customer View
What it means is that everyone on the team has access to and knowledge about your customers from every
facet of your business. Unfortunately, in the average business operations model, sales/marketing, development/operations and support/delivery function as silos in the business.
In most companies, sales and marketing gathers their information. Once
a customer is closed, they go over to development and operations or
support and delivery. Each department has their own information about
the customer and often there is no visibility into the sales and marketing data that has been gathered. Conversely, the sales and marketing
people have no visibility into the information in the accounting system
or in a support system.
360 degree Customer View
Development
& Operations
Support &
Delivery
CUSTOMERS
Sales &
We know that such a system is limiting. The idea of a 360 degree CusMarketing
tomer View is to create a system where sales people know everything
about the last support inquiry and the support people know everything the customer told the sales person
during the sales process. Both departments can leverage that information rather than continually asking
the customer the same set of questions. When that happens, it does not establish a lot of trust in the customer’s mind.
If you would like more proof, our research with customers shows that without really doing much other than
scratching the surface in this, you can generate a 4 percent increase in sales. That’s a 4 percent increase in
your current sales by establishing a single place where everybody on your team can see everything there is
Current Sales
25%
to know about a customer. The increase is without new marketing programs, hiring additional sales people
or the addition of any staff. It is really not that hard to do.
www.salesnexus.com
Lost Sales
75%
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16. CUSTOMERS
Sales &
Marketing
360 degree View of the Customer Relationship for Business Growth
The concept is based on the fundamental fact that most businesses close maybe
20-30 percent of their sales opportunities that are pursued month to month or
quarter to quarter. If all you do is improve coordination between team members—and you lose 1 percent fewer of those sales—that translates into a 4 percent increase in sales. If you really want to understand these numbers, you may
want to ask for a spreadsheet we can send to input your own numbers. When
you understand the math, you will see that it’s true. It works.
Current Sales
25%
Lost Sales
75%
With a 1 percent reduction in lost sales when you pursue $400,000 in sales a month,
it means that $100,000 closes and $300,000 (75 percent) is lost. All we are going to do is to reduce that
$300,000 by 1 percent ($3,000). We can expect to sell $3,000 more out of the amount we typically lose each
TRUST
RELIABILITY
month. We simply carve off a little piece of the lost sales and move it over into the current sales column. DELIGHT
T = r +d
Ways to Win More Customers
As we discussed earlier, we want to win more customers, sell them more and keep them longer. There are
a lot of ways to win more customers. We can reach out to more prospects or identify more likely buyers.
Those are things we have talked about in earlier eBooks of the series.
Another way to win more customers is to go head to head against competition. You’ve identified a prospect
and identified them as a likely buyer. If they are comparing you to one or more of your competitors you have
price and quality and other things that have to do with your product. They might compare your service in
ways that vary greatly from one business to another. We won’t get into those things here.
Then there is this one other factor. It is your service—your responsiveness. How quickly to you respond to
your customers and how important is that factor to them? It depends on your business and the situation of
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17. 360 degree View of the Customer Relationship for Business Growth
your customer—but we all know of situations where just a few minutes can make all the difference in the
world. Many of our businesses today are not geared to ever respond to a customer in minutes. The internal
communication needed to respond makes everything take a considerable amount of time. That one factor
is causing you to lose sales.
Improve Service and Responsiveness
Understand that an improvement in response time can lead to more sales and there is a simple way to do
that. Simply let everybody on your team have access to the sales commitments that have been made. Let
anyone who touches the customer or prospect see the proposals, quotes, design documents and specifications. What information needs to be shared will vary from one company to the next, but we all have things
that sales people talk about with prospects. They make commitments. In some businesses the commitments will be very similar from deal to deal. In others, they are wildly different and the details really matter.
Do you currently have access to that information without the sales person’s help?
•
•
•
•
The documents put together by the sales rep.
A presentation shown to a customer.
An email that was sent or an email with a proposal attached.
Simple notes about a conversation with the customer.
As a business owner do you have access to that information for reference? How about your support manager or operations manager? Probably not.
Let’s just talk about emails for a moment. Can you access your sale people’s emails without their help?
When a sales person is not around and the customer calls to respond to an email by moving forward, can
you get a copy of that email without having to track down your sales person?
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18. 360 degree View of the Customer Relationship for Business Growth
If you already have that ability, you see why it can be very important to the customer’s perception of your
commitment to them. If you don’t, you may not know how detrimentally that situation can affect the sale.
In this screen shot you can see a client of SalesNexus, Bonnie Hill. I can go to her customer record and see
notes about meetings, things typed in as a sales person, a history of all marketing emails and other things. I
have also automatically attached all of the emails that I exchange with Bonnie. These are not marketing emails
sent by our email marketing engine. Just regular emails, sent using Outlook and the ones she sent me.
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19. 360 degree View of the Customer Relationship for Business Growth
I can pull up my own emails and the emails that customers have exchanged with other people on my team.
So when a customer calls me and says that they want to ask questions about the design suggestions made
by another team member, I can pull up that email—even when I was not copied on the email originally.
An All-too-Familiar Story
A customer calls and says, “I received a proposal yesterday from
Steve and I’m ready to place my order, but I just had a couple of
questions.” Steve is the salesperson that probably visited the
prospects office with a proposal. He may have even emailed
the proposal.
The customer did not get a chance to look at it until the following morning. They call—but the problem is—Steve’s not
around. Where is he? He’s out seeing other customers.
So what does the receptionist do at that point? She says, “Steve is not here right now. Let me take a
message and have him call you back.”
That may have worked a decade ago. Back then customers might be okay with waiting a day or two.
But this is 2013 and customers are not in the mood to wait.
When you say, “I’ll have him call you back” what does that mean? Does it mean you’re going to get
Steve on the phone right now and say, “Call this customer immediately”? Maybe—if you can. He might
be in a meeting. He might not hear your message. He might be on a plane. He might be on vacation.
How long is the customer going to wait? How long will she wait before she just does a Google search
to look for a competitor because she’s tired of waiting?
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20. 360 degree View of the Customer Relationship for Business Growth
This happens more often than you know and it’s really avoidable. If you have access to those emails and proposals that sales people are sending out, the receptionist can say, “I’ve got a copy of the proposal right here.
Let me get somebody else on the phone to help you.” The order is taken right then and there. Everybody is
better off.
Maximizing Revenue Per Customer
The first step in reaching the goal of maximizing revenue per customer is to know the customer’s needs in as
much detail as possible. We want to know about their industry because that indicates what they need. We
want to know about their role in their organization and what that tells us. Maybe it’s demographic information like what neighborhood they live in or their income level or their education level.
All of these things tell us something about what they need. Then, of course, in our sales conversations we
have dialogue with the customer and learn even more about their needs. For a lot of us, this information is
stored in the head of the salesperson. It never goes any further than between the salesperson’s ears.
Instead, we can have tailored offerings for specific sets of needs. Or we can cross-sell and up-sell.
TYPICAL EXAMPLE: I may have a customer who bought a retail level, inexpensive product. I then
realized that they are actually a construction manager at a home builder. Now I have a whole different package that I sell to home builders. Once I make that connection, I can up-sell them to a more
expensive package that may be more valuable to them.
Can you cross-sell and up-sell and do it well and early? This is the way it typically goes:
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21. Sales &
Marketing
360 degree View of the Customer Relationship for Business Growth
The process begins with a lot of information gathering. Maybe it starts by going to the accounting system to
get a list of customers by product purchased. It must be cross-referenced with the sales person. The sales
person gets their list and is told to contact the customer and offer them “this”.
There are so many steps in the process; you probably don’t do it at all…or at least very often. There is a treCurrent Sales
mendous amount of lost opportunity.
25%
BETTER WAY: What if you were able to reach out to a specific type of customer and affordably
make a specific offer that has a high probability of being appealing to them?
Customer Loyalty
Lost Sales
75%
A lot of things can factor into building customer loyalty. It can be price, location, marketing or trust. For
some products or services, location and price can be a big deciding factor. In most business, it is clear that
trust is the most important factor in building loyalty.
How do you keep customers longer?
• Provide great service and support so they have no
reason to go anywhere else.
• Keep adding value to the equation for them.
T = r +d
TRUST
RELIABILITY
DELIGHT
An example is the way so many people have come to trust Apple Computer products. When people get
their first iPhone, they are thrilled and delighted. That delight creates a lot of trust in Apple as a company
and many have been iPhone users for a very long time. The fact that the phone can be trusted to work every
day leads to trusting the company and other products sold by them.
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22. 360 degree View of the Customer Relationship for Business Growth
What Damages Trust in a Business Relationship?
Most of the time, it happens when you say one thing and do another. The most common way that happens
to a customer is when marketing or a sales rep says one thing—but the customer experience doesn’t match.
You may be advertising and marketing with promises about what the experience is going to be.
Maybe the promise is made in a sales presentation, sales proposal, sales conversations; maybe even subtle
hints are being made by the sales person. The implication may not be sanctioned by the business, but they
are happening anyway. The promise (or implied promise) creates an expectation for the customer. When
your company, or any member of your team, doesn’t live up to expectations; trust is damaged.
What is unfortunate is that it doesn’t take a lot. It could even be a very insignificant detail in the grand
scheme of things. It is simply the fact that you said one thing and you did another that damages trust. You
build loyalty and trust by living up to your commitments.
Questions to Ask About Trust
• Who made the commitment and do you know what it was?
• Do you know the commitments made by your sales people?
• Do you have a way to access the email dialogue during the sales process?
When you have a customer ready to purchase…they may have received a proposal…they may have seen
the presentation…you may have already sent them an invoice…then somebody starts asking new questions.
They may want more detail about the terms and conditions or your return policy or something. Some of the
dialog may happen by email. How often does your sales person let the customer make some assumptions
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23. 360 degree View of the Customer Relationship for Business Growth
that aren’t entirely true? Do you ever know about that? When you don’t know—what happens to the relationship with the customer? It damages their trust in you. It is the beginning of the end of that relationship.
Information Silos
We understand that we win and keep customers through service and responsiveness. The problem is you
cannot act without the proper information. Way too often, we find ourselves waiting for someone else on
the team in order to get information needed to respond to the customer. So, the lack of information—or the
silos of information—causes our service and responsiveness to be damaged
• We can’t maximize the revenue per customer by cross-selling and up-selling if we can’t target the
right customers.
• It can be difficult to collate data and take action to keep customers longer by building trust.
• We can’t be consistent unless we know the commitments made by others on the team to each
customer.
It’s not just the sales people that are the culprits here. It could be the other way around. The support staff
may tell a customer that an issue will be fixed by the end of Friday. Then the sales guy gets a call on Monday
morning saying, “Hey, your support team never came through for me.”
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24. 360 degree View of the Customer Relationship for Business Growth
Access to Information Required for 360 degree Customer View
Remember our original business objectives? We want to win more customers, sell them more and keep
them longer. We now know that you have to find a way to give everybody on your team information about
your customers to get a 360 degree view of them to earn their
trust and loyalty. It’s all about access to information.
Everyone needs to know what commitments have been made, the
current status of any ongoing support tickets and everything else.
Universal Business Objectives
We want to win more customers.
We want to sell them more.
When you have a 360 degree customer view, the customer is
We want to keep them longer.
placed in the middle and around them are all the different folks
on your team that interact with them. The sales person needs to
know that the accounting department just called the customer
about a past due bill. Maybe the bill is way past due—30, 60, 90 days past due—and the accounting department is starting to threaten the customer with cancellation or other penalities. The sales person needs
to know. You don’t want them making a call at this particular moment to cross-sell or up-sell the customer.
It’s just putting all the information in one place so everyone on the
team has access and can take action with it.
Resistance to Sharing Information
There are two main objections to creating a system for 360 degree
customer view. The first one is about the costs and the other is difficulty of getting everybody on the same page with a new way of
doing things. That’s the change management aspect of it.
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25. 360 degree View of the Customer Relationship for Business Growth
Low Cost Options
You don’t have to use SalesNexus to accomplish your information sharing goals. You don’t even have to use a
CRM to do it. You can do it piecemeal until it makes sense to automate with a CRM. It can be very inexpensive.
Email
You can set rules on your email server that just auto copy all of your sales person’s email into some other
mailbox that is accessible and searchable. It’s pretty simple and not expensive at all. A little crude, but it works.
Documents
You can store proposals in a cloud drive that is shared. That way all team members can log in from wherever
they happen to be. Even over the weekend and away from the office, everyone with log-in information has
access to the proposals. It’s real simple and not very expensive at all. Your only issue is getting everybody in
the habit of putting those proposals in there consistently.
Written Commitment to Customers
This one doesn’t cost you a dime and it really helps to build trust. Create written commitments that everyone on the team follows. It will get everyone on the same page—including the customer about what can be
expected. All day, every day, you’re doing what you do for your customers and you do it well. So why not let
the customer know what you will do?
Bring in new customers with a written commitment that says, “Mr. Customer, welcome onboard. Here is
our commitment to you. On day one, we’re going to do this and three days later you will see this. Then you
will get a call from my guy, Frank, in service and he’s going to do this.” Lay it all out for the customer. You are
going to do it anyway, right? So lay it out for him and put it in writing. Then when you execute the plan, the
customer feels that you have gone the extra mile for them. It builds loyalty and trust in you.
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26. 360 degree View of the Customer Relationship for Business Growth
Customer Relationship Management (CRM)
360 degree Customer View The alternative is to invest in a CRM solution or some other sort of database that allows access for members
of your team. If you are concerned about the cost, consider what we talked about earlier. Think about the
4 percent increase in sales. If you are acquiring more customers, getting more revenue per customer and
Development
Support &
keeping your customer longer—plus—sales go up 4 percent as a result…the CRM actually costs you noth& Operations
Delivery
ing. It is a healthy, healthy, healthy investment in your business.
CUSTOMERS
It may appear to be a self-serving position we are taking. Really 4 percent is a minor piece of the puzzle.
What you have found in this eBook is only about the increase in sales that comes from better relationship
Sales &
Marketing
management and information management. This eBook hasn’t even discussed the increase in sales that
comes from better email marketing and better sales process management. Those subjects are covered in
other eBooks.
SAVINGS TIP: You don’t necessarily need to pay for accounts or software for everyone on your
team. There are ways to slice and dice things to keep costs down. People can share accounts within
a department. It may not be necessary to have a separate account for each individual in the accounting department. Each of them may only use it a couple of times a day for five minutes at a
time. Sharing accounts within the department is one way to control cost. The same thing can be true
for your production group, administrative support or even executive level staff.
Current Sales
25%
Lost Sales
75%
Often a company will come to SalesNexus interested in getting the sales team on board with the program.
We will start talking to them about the 360 degree customer view and ask about what they will do about
the support team like accounting and collections. Often, the knee jerk reaction is to say they don’t want to
pay for those guys. We think it is a mistake. Based on what we have talked about in this eBook, leaving off
some of the team is somewhat shortsighted.
www.salesnexus.com
T = r +d
TRUST
RELIABILITY
DELIGHT
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27. 360 degree View of the Customer Relationship for Business Growth
Current developed databases
Many companies already have databases in place to manage specialized information within the business. It
may be a third party system that is industry specific. You may wonder if a CRM would need to connect with
those other systems.
The answer is “Probably not.” There is a difference between making it easy and making it useful. You can
spend a lot of money to make your system super-automated. But, you may be able to save money by doing
a little bit of manual work every once in a while. There may be a way to leverage existing technology so you
can exchange information.
For example, you may be able to go into your accounting system and export a list of all customers and what
they bought recently…and then import that into your CRM. You can do that once a month or once a week. It
may be plenty. You wouldn’t need to hire a developer at this stage.
Once you have begun to realize the return on all of this, you can hire a developer. You will be much more
confident in making that kind of investment. You will already know what will come of it.
Implementation Time for 360 degree Customer View
We tell our customers that when they use the “Quick Start” program, it will unfold over the course of two to
three weeks. Of course, it depends on how quickly the customer responds and gets us the information we
need. Then it may take 2-4 weeks for everyone to get used to using the system and fine tune things.
So, that means you will “humming along” in the new system within 60 days. You are seeing benefits. You are
beyond the learning curve. You are glad you did this. So—that is relatively quick for any kind of technology
or process change in any business.
www.salesnexus.com
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28. 360 degree View of the Customer Relationship for Business Growth
Bringing it All Together
Every eBook in this Business Growth Series has the potential to transform your business. The information
you are learning here comes from noticing what works for our successful clients and developing a process
for duplicating the results consistently across multiple businesses.
We are fortunate to have a front row seat in observing success in our clients. They tell us what they are doing to make the best use of our service. Through their contribution to our knowledge, we are able to bring
these cutting-edge concepts to you in this series.
What you are learning in this series are:
• Universal Principals of business and sales that have always been the foundation of success.
• A response to the changes in consumer preferences and buying patterns.
• Methods for integrating technology in a way that enhances relationships while also increasing efficiency and time management.
• Cost effective tools for making the most out of resources to improve revenues.
We have been able to develop these processes because we hear what is working for our clients. Now we
want to hear from you. What have you tried from this eBook Series? What has made a difference? Is there
anything that simply did not work for you? Is there something you have learned that you would like to share
with others?
www.salesnexus.com
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29. 360 degree View of the Customer Relationship for Business Growth
Next Steps
We hope that you’ve benefited from our ebook! We truly want to help you take your business to the next
level. If you have questions about how these ideas can best be applied in your business, we’re only a phone
call away! Really! Call or email and we’ll do our best to help however we can.
All the best,
Craig Klein
CEO, SalesNexus.com
713.862.0001
Free Live Training
For hands on instruction on how to write emails, create email templates and build campaigns, join our
weekly live training session on Wednesdays at 3pm ET. http://support.salesnexus.com/training/
Sales Growth Webinars and ebooks
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http://www.salesnexus.com/sales-growth-webinar-series/
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