Are you focusing your attention on new opportunities? Or keeping focus on current clients to see if there are additional opportunities there?
When you finalize a deal with a client and are looking for new business, it is common for sales professionals to dust off their hands of the prior project and start fresh with new companies. When you are brainstorming on how to fill the gap, did you know that it is more affordable to dig into your current clientele and see what challenges you may be able to help them with rather than jumping in with a new customer?
It often times costs 10 times more to acquire a new client than it does to sell to an existing client.
But, selling more to an existing customer can be difficult without the right strategy and tools.
White space is the gap between what products or services your customer has invested in, and the other products or services that your company or business has to offer.
For example, financial advisors who offer mutual funds, exchange traded funds and insurance have many individuals and households as customers. One customer may already have a 401K consisting of mutual funds and also have a life insurance policy.
But the financial advisor has many other products she can offer her customer based on demographics such as age, marital status and annual salary. The gap between the financial advisor’s available products and the products the customer has been offered is the whitespace.
The financial advisor must now discover what her customer has purchased, in order to offer other complementing products.
The same formula applies to the account executive that sells to businesses. The account executive must identify the business processes used with his customer.
Then, he must understand the critical business issue or pain point with that business process. If the company has a project in the works to solve the pain point in the business, the account executive must find a solution to match the pain point.
The whitespace is the gap between the pain points the company is feeling, and the solutions they have in place to meet those needs.
To sell more to your customer, you must find the whitespace and fill it with your product or service.
4 strategies you can use to offer more value to your customer by finding the white space in their business.
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- Review their challenges to see where you can provide solutions to make their day to day tasks easier.
- Study and review their business as a whole, put yourself in their shoes to see where you may be able to fill the gaps with your product. Digging into their current processes can assist in determining what product of yours can fill those spaces while also benefitting them.
- Focus on where your customer is devoting their time. They may not be aware of services offered, and you may not be aware of how much of their time is going into a particular task.
- Review your current offerings with them. While businesses are constantly evolving, your services need to stay at that same pace. You ensuring they are provided with the best product can guarantee they are getting the most out of your service, and can be an opportunity for an additional sale.
Performing white space analysis on a regular basis for existing customers can be a daunting task. Fully understanding the products and services that have been sold and, more over, the products and services that haven’t been sold can be difficult to identify and visualize.
Are you trying to get more business with your existing customers but having trouble locating those opportunities that are hiding in your own data? We can help.
