I know it’s important to increase your customer base and that an important part of that is not only acquiring new customers but also maintaining existing ones.
I’m Keith, the guy with the tie, who developed the First Aid Trakker software solution that former Zee Medical, Respond Distributors, and many others use daily to run their businesses since 2005.
Here I will give some tips on how to maintain your existing customers while making time to increase your customer base.
Some Obvious Suggestions
Make sure your Reps:
- Know all of your products and services
- Understand your Customer’s Safety Needs
- Know what their specific customers need
- Know what products and services a particular industry needs
- This can help reps cover another territory when one is sick or on vacation
Some Actually Useful Tips:
1st: create Guild Lines for how many cabinets are needed based upon the physical size of the building and/or number of employees.
2nd: Give your reps consistent starting points for new customers, whether they are brand new or a veteran, they all know what is expected as a starting point for any new customer.
Start by Make Templates of the products and services specific industries need such as:
- Restaurants
- Hotels
- Office buildings
- Churches
- Farms
- …
A Template of course, is not an exact fit for every customer.
But by starting with the Template, even a new rep has a springboard to start and make changes to fit a specific customer’s needs.
Finally, they need to save these cabinet specifics with Product Fill Levels in a way that they can be easily shared with your other reps.
This way, if they ever leave or take time off someone else can easily service that customer…
Some Actual Template Tools
#1 Old School Solution
Write it all down on a piece of paper, with just your ‘secret’ product codes and hide it behind the cabinet.
Yes, I know some reps do this. I’ve heard them explain how, “No one will think to look there.” Plus they are using your product codes so no competitor would think to look there, and if they did they wouldn’t be able to decipher your product codes
PROS
- All of your reps can use these ‘cheat sheets.’
CONS
- Does not help them locate where all of the cabinets are in the building
- It is definitely Not Secure.
#2 Basic Online Spreadsheet Solution
The next approach I have seen is to use online spreadsheets for the industry templates.
This is a seemingly simple approach.
In order to do this, management and/or office staff simply creates templates for each type of industry in Microsoft Excel or Google Sheets then save it online to One Drive (Microsoft) or Google Drive (Google). They might make different documents for each industry or easier still, make one document with a different worksheet/tab for each industry.
This creates an electronic version that is shared with all of the reps so that they can copy the templates and work with them and make copies of them for each customer with the actual products and fill levels of each product in each cabinet.
PROS
- Easy to create
- Cheap
- Stored in a central cloud location, so everyone in the company can access the information
- Secure from any competitors
CONS
- The reps in the field trying to read and update this data on their phones or tablets find it cumbersome
- Managing the security and giving access to new users is a bit of a challenge.
#3 A Better Solution
Use a software package that has templates built into it that can be defined by the office management and seen by everyone in the office as well as easily accessed and viewed on a phone or tablet by reps in the field.
A system that contains all of your customers, with each sales rep having access to all of their customer list and the ability to create new Prospects or Customers, generating new Customer Cabinets starting from your company templates.
Then they can then easily customize that to that customer’s specific needs creating a list of cabinets with details about where they are located in the building and the specific fill levels needed for each one.
These cabinets are then available to whomever may be filling in for a sick or vacationing sales rep. This makes the work quicker and easier for the rep to fill in and the customer is receiving the same service they would from their regular rep.
This keeps the customer supplied with everything they need regardless of who on your team is servicing them.
PROS
- Easy for rep to access and customize to customer’s needs
- Easily accessible by all office staff and reps as needed
- Automated Fill Levels decrease service time
- Allowing more time for prospecting to Increase you Customer Base
- Any rep can service any customer
- Can see the list of all cabinet locations
- Can QUICKLY identify needed products from the Fill List
- Customer specific pricing is right (read BONUS below)
- Secure from competition
- Can be securely shared with only those employees who need access to it
CONS
- Costs more than a piece of paper behind the cabinet (but less than postage)
(Yes, First Aid Trakker does ALL of this)
BONUS NOTE:
If this customer has an agreement with the office management to receive any special pricing, that would automatically apply and the substitute rep would have that pricing automatically applied for the customer.