Please create agendas for each of the reasons, why you visit your customers, below:

As you know sending an agenda, before every meeting is a really power sales resource, which will help you to differentiate you from your competitors.

Invest some time now to create an agenda, for each of the purposes, you created for visiting your existing customers below. This exercise will serve to save you loads of time in the future and will support you to be properly prepared, before attending any meeting with your existing customers, in the future.

• Please create the agendas and keep them on file.
• Only record all the different agendas below.
• The detail, must be stored in a place, which is easy to access. An online facility, which can be accessed from anywhere is best.

Example:

• Use sales data, reports or any other method you can utilise, to hold discussions with clients around their current product usage and how this can be optimised.
• Meet to ensure that the best operational structure is in place.
• Visit to get to know who the decision makers are, who the influencers are and who the gatekeepers are.
• Get to know who uses your organisations services owners, directors, operational users, receptionists, accounts people, etc.
  • Uncover the needs of each group and develop an optimised plan for each of the people identified previously.
• Visit clients with an open mind and look for innovative ways to show them your organisational value.
• Record all customer needs and requests in your CRM system, so that you will follow through until needs are met or challenges solved
• Try to find innovative ways to add value to your customers
• Ask for referrals
• Request recorded testimonials
• Identify cross and up selling opportunities
• Find innovative ways to integrate into your customers businesses
• Build relationships
• Solution seeking
• Visit accounts people mid-month and drop off biscuits, muffins or doughnuts, so that you can build great relationships with them.
  • This will help with collections at the end of the month.
  • They will realise that they matter and that you don’t only call them when you want something, namely a cheque or payment.
• Examine lost customers and try to reactivate them

If I cherry pick, just one of the above, as a sample, it would look like this:

Identify Cross and Up Selling opportunities

Agenda:

• Can you describe any challenges you are experiencing with the following:
  • Sales staff retention
  • Appointing new sales team members
  • An induction program for any new sales team members
• What plans do you have in place to address the above?
• Suggested solutions

If my objective is to support them to acquire a CRM system, the agenda would look as follows:

• How is your team currently tracking deals, as they move through their sales funnel?
• How does your team do effective route planning
• How do you ensure that your sales team, visits all of their existing customers?
• How do you as a sales leader, measure how often your sales team calls on prospects an existing customers
  • How do you keep track of your sales teams deal, as they move through their sales funnel?
• Suggested solutions

As you can see the above agendas, are designed to help me lead a customer towards a specific, optimised solution for them. I have strategic business alliances with the following organisations and when uncovering opportunities, for me to cross and up sell these, I would use a specific agenda, similar to the ones above, to positively influence my customers to use these services.

• An appointment generation company
• A sales staff placement agency
• A local CRM company

I have every agenda, available online, so when I am planning to visit an existing customer, it is really easy for me to acquire the specific agenda I need for that specific meeting.

Think about all the purposes, you have for calling on your existing customers and describe in detail, each specific agenda, you will deploy, when visiting each customer.