Hold On To Your Most Important Customers

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by Miller Heiman

This will come as no surprise to you, but we don’t live in a perfect world. Yet, a lot of the traditional methods of selling are based on the belief that we do. They work on the premise that you have the time and resources to treat all your accounts with the same care and attention. And that all your clients appreciate and value your hard work. Wouldn’t that be nice? The truth is, if you want to succeed in the real world, you have to take care of the accounts that take care of you. That means making some priorities. And to do that you have to do two things:

1) Identify your “Large Accounts” and concentrate your limited resources on those opportunities with the best chances of high return.

2) Safeguard your investments by systematically managing those committed resources.

Identifying Your Large Accounts

We don’t buy the old-fashioned idea that all customers should be treated the same. A nice idea for a perfect world, but in the real world, the facts are brutally plain: To stay in business today, you have to give not only more attention, but also a more dedicated kind of attention, to “opportunities with the best chances of high return.” That’s why we focus on the Large Account.

What do we mean by “Large?” We’ll give you a two-part definition.

The first part is both subjective and pragmatic. “Large” means large in importance -- important to you and to your business. Whatever the current figures, whatever the trend, whatever the potential. If you consider it important, it’s by definition a Large Account.

Think of your critical accounts. The ones that pay the rent and capital expenditures. That account for the bulk of your selling time. And that you’re happy to keep knocking yourself out for because you rely on them for steady sales incomes.

Now think of the accounts that have you sweating. The ones with great potential that aren’t going anywhere. The ones that have you pacing the floor at three o’clock in the morning, with a sales report in one hand and an antacid in the other.

Think in short of those accounts that you cannot afford to do without. It’s those accounts – and accounts with the potential to become this important --- that we identify as Large Accounts.

The second part of our definition is more objective. It derives from a statistical pattern we first observed a decade ago. We call it the 5 percent pattern.

The 5 Percent Pattern:

5 percent of your customers bring in over 50 percent of your business

When we first identified this pattern in our own account figures, the “weighting” toward those few, big fish seemed excessive. But all of our subsequent research has confirmed this statistic. While watching the 5 percent “basket” is critical, remember it’s 50 percent, not 100 percent, of your business. So it’s not the only basket you have to watch. But that’s an issue left for another column.

Safeguarding Your Assets

Because large accounts are so critical to the survival of modern business, we don’t consider them simply “customers” or “accounts.” We call them external assets.

Traditionally assets have been defined as the tangible property a company controls. Recently, it’s become fashionable to adopt a slightly broader definition, to include such intangibles as employee goodwill and market reputation.

We go one step beyond that. We say that Large Accounts – even though they’re “external” – are every bit as important to a company’s success as state-of-the-art machinery or productive workers. So they too have to be defined as assets.

And – here’s the revolutionary point – if they’re assets, they have to be managed like assets.

This doesn’t happen very often. When we ask our corporate clients how their Large Accounts got to be large, a common response is, “We don’t know.” In some cases, good old-fashioned salesmanship at a few decentralized buying locations gradually coalesced into a Large Account. In other cases, luck played a part: The selling organization happened to be in the right place at the right time. In still others, the Large Account started small and just grew.

But – and it’s a 24-karat but – this scenario is on the way out. The days of Large Accounts that just grow are not only numbered, they’re gone.

So are the days when a company could keep a Large Account on the basis of traditional business ties or customer loyalty. It’s sad but true: Customer loyalty is almost as dated as the Model T, and business that think they can keep major accounts alive without aggressive, studious management are falling by the wayside every day.

In today’s climate, two facts are plain:

1) The systematic management of Large Accounts is becoming more, not less, critical to business survival.

2) Virtually no one knows how to manage Large Accounts effectively, as the major business assets that they are.

In fact, it’s not going too far to say that one of the most glaring needs in business today is for a systematic approach to the Large Account that will ensure not only the continuity of revenue today, but steady growth of these critical assets into the future. If you recognize the 5 percent pattern we’ve identified; if you have a gnawing suspicion that some of your major business opportunities are stagnating or “underdeveloped;” if you sometimes find that your selling energies are being spread impossibly thin; most of all, if you feel the need for clearer understanding and better control of those accounts that are keeping you in business, then a Large Account management strategy is a necessity.

Adapted from Successful Large Account Management