Current industry trends have greatly increased pressure on telecom sales teams to drive revenue and close deals among customers who have more options (and incentives to switch) than ever before.
As a telecom provider, you need a sales approach that truly connects with and grows your customer base. With a strong connections-based mindset, you maximize your profitability and your customer lifetime value.
So, what’s the foundation of a connections-based sales process? Customer retention.
Why Customer Retention Comes First
As your telecom service provider network expands into new markets and pursues new customer sign-ups, it’s critical to maintain a customer retention mindset even while you’re working on new customer acquisition. Not only are new customer acquisition costs higher than retaining current customers, but successful customer retention helps to strengthen your brand identity and business reputation.
Retention And Competitive Advantage
Cutthroat competition in the telecom industry has many telecom providers tempting potential customers to switch with new tactics and incentives. These approaches include everything from giveaways, free merchandise, and discounted trial periods to simply asking prospects to send in their current telecom bill in order to get a lower price.
In this intensely competitive environment, your sales team needs to build rapport with a prospect that looks beyond the initial close. In fact, rapport-building should be an essential part of sales training in any outbound sales environment. The right level of relationship-building invested early in the lead generation process pays dividends over the long term as you retain current customers and gain new ones.
Creating A Telecom Customer Retention Strategy
Surprisingly, many telecom service providers don’t have a customer retention strategy. Yet, if you’re entering a new market or experiencing high initial adoption of your product, you need a robust customer retention strategy to prevent losing any market share to competitors.
Most sales managers believe that customer retention is merely a matter of resolving complaints or quelling current customer concerns, but that’s only a reactive approach. To be truly successful, you need a proactive framework that gives customers and prospects alike the same high priority.
Customer retention is primarily driven by building rapport and deepening the relationships with your clientele. Here are three customer retention strategies to ensure top-line growth at your telecom business:
- Leverage your sales database to track average customer retention rates and then proactively address any issues before customers consider switching providers.
- Analyze upsell and cross-selling patterns to maximize your sales growth among your current customer base.
- Promote retention-oriented products that address the highest pains of switching to a competitor’s offerings.
Acquiring new business telecom customers starts with retaining the ones you currently have. Only after you have an effective customer retention strategy in place are you assured that new top-line growth shows up on your bottom line.
Start turning your leads into lifetime business telecom customers. Download this whitepaper from Invenio Solutions® and discover how to make – and retain – a loyal sales connection with customers.
This article was syndicated from Business 2 Community: Trying To Grow Telecom Sales? Start With Customer Retention
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