As a sales professional, you may be responsible to manage your own portfolio of clients with the goal to retain those clients and upsell additional services and products when they need them. Regardless of how many clients are in your portfolio, you will need to follow these 3 best practices to ensure the highest client retention and increase your upsell opportunities.
#1 Prioritize Your Portfolio
Prioritizing your portfolio is an important step to managing it. Identifying your daily priorities can help reduce stress, increase your focus, and improve productivity in the workplace.
You’ll also discover that prioritizing your portfolio will open up more opportunities. Rather than being bogged down with low value tasks and busy work, you can target bigger opportunities.
We suggest that you prioritize your portfolio by current opportunity, future opportunity, and complexity, with current opportunity as highest priority. These are just general criteria’s that can apply to most situations, but your company may have some additional criteria and best practices that you might want to incorporate.
#2 Pre-Schedule Periodic Update Meetings
An occasional email to check in on how you’re client is doing with your product or service does not suffice. As a sales professional, you should not downplay the importance of periodically meeting with your client. These regular meetings will help you understand, build trust, and increase productivity with your client which all help with retaining your client.
Periodic meetings are also an opportunity to upsell your services and products. When a client feels understood and trusts their sales person, they’re more willing to open up what is working for them and their pain points. That leaves an opportunity for you to upsell your product and provide a solution to your client’s problem.
#3 Have a Pre-Planned Agenda For Every Call
Having a pre-planned agenda for your periodic meetings will not only take off the burden of running another meeting from your client, it will make the most out of you and your client’s time. This ensures that both parties are leaving the meeting with something of value.
When you’re agenda is set up correctly, you will be able to collect all the information you need to upsell the client the right solution and show the benefits of the relationship, increasing your chances of retaining that client.
To help you with this step, we’ve created a worksheet that has everything you need to ensure the best agenda for each of you’re client portfolio calls.
Download our Worksheet:
Upselling and retaining your clients can be challenging, but if you use this information properly, you’ll see the results.
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