The Secret To Success Part 2—Make Customers Money!

Depending on the solutions you sell, it may require doing some real homework. So much of the time we focus on the expense side of the income statement, but we forget that our solutions can contribute to the revenue side.

Consider areas we overlook. Does your solution make your customer more responsive to their customers? For example, many IT systems solutions, while improving productivity and reducing costs, also improve the ability of your customer to respond to their customers. Improving responsiveness can help them improve their ability to win new deals.

Likewise, if your solution helps improve customer satisfaction, it can improve customer retention and drive increases in revenue.

With a little creative thought, you can discover many areas to help customers increase their revenues. Sometimes the easiest way to do this is to talk to different people in your customer. Typically, you may deal with operations, IT, finance, procurement or administrative operations. Try meeting with the sales, marketing and strategy people in your customers. You will discover all sorts of opportunities.

Recently, I completed a project with a large client. Their products typically helped their customers run very large telecommunications networks more efficiently and with higher availability. Usually, they justified their solutions on efficiency, reliability and cost reduction. As an experiment, we spoke to the VP’s of sales and marketing for their customers.

We discovered a whole new range of benefits and capabilities my client’s products already provided, but were not being exploited by their customers in driving revenue services. Their customers started offering new services—enabled by my clients’ products. These services drove incremental revenues from their current customers and allowed them to attract new customers who wanted those services. We discovered a whole range of things that our client had taken for granted, or their customers did not understand that directly increased the revenues their clients could achieve.

In the current economy, everyone is searching for ways for growing their sales. The easiest way to grow yours is to show your customers how you help them grow theirs!