Building a Customer Base

Building A Customer Base
Even great products have a limited reach. Great products without the sales people to build a customer base will never achieve their true potential. We often assume that customer are completely well informed. The reality is that many customers do not have time to be informed. A good sales force finds potential customers, monitors them, and if the product-customer fit is right, turns them into business for the company.
As new companies find out, managing a sales force for customer growth takes time and effort.
Today's customer are absolutely overwhelmed with media messages. Though a sales force is just one part of a company's sales plan, it can be the glue that makes everything work. Properly motivated and trained sales people go out and find new customers, convert them to business, and monitor their satisfaction with current products and provide feedback to product development on potential new products and enhancements. Really tuned-in sales people often are the first line of customer satisfaction and can get word back quickly before problems escalate to disasters. No sales person wants an unhappy customer. The old saying used to be that an unhappy customer told thirty five other customers. Today the number is likely to be much higher. Sales people cannot function without referrals and credibility. An unhappy customer is death to both. One of the first steps to building a customer, is defining your target customer which might well change over time. It is hard to go looking for something when you do not know what you hope to find. Once you have the target customer defined, it is all about hunting which if you are to be successful means you have to look in the right locations and do it efficiently. Doing it efficiently means sales guidance from managers or more experienced sales people. Sales people thrive off of properly given training which often does not mean a formal course which generally turns off some of the best people. Many sales forces operate very effectively off of weekly or monthly meetings were their skills are gradually honed. The best training for sales people is joint calls with a more experienced sales person. Of course this means structuring your compensation so that making joint calls does not unfairly burden one sales person over the other. A sales force establishes beach heads in different customer sets, sometimes even finding market segments that the company has not had time to explore. To be effective over the long term, a sales force has to be consistently managed, have an opportunity to own and work a territory and to be fairly compensated for their successes. Back to Effectively Utilizing Resources Sales Force Guidance and Effectively Utilizing Sales Resources