SUCCESS STORIES

Acting on sentiment churn leads to large sale

By carefully tracking the churn of people in accounts the GM unexpectedly found and quickly closed one of the biggest sales of the year, which was about to go to a competitor because there had been a change in representation

Industry: B2B construction industry. Traditional model of having a large number of people out in the field

Use case: Customer Relationship MirrorWave

In this organisation churn in people was a real challenge, both in their own staff turnover and also on the client side.  High churn is not uncommon: an average company has 20% churn on the company side, combined with 20% churn on customer side, amounting to 40% churn in relationships in total.

Companies that keep track of relationship churn can do a whole lot better than their competitors.

Even if a company has a CRM program, their data is still only as good as the information that goes into it. Running a MirrorWave program means the process of putting a clean list of customers together happens at least twice a year, for each ‘wave’, and gives the task of populating CRM a specific purpose, beyond admin for the sake of it.

For this company much of the effort initially was in getting their list together - this proved particularly valuable because there was considerable churn on both the customer and on their own side and no one person had the complete picture. Because the MirrorWave system demands an up to date list for every wave, they got into the routine of keeping track of people over time.

The company GM followed up on an overdue Close the Loop 1:1 rapid response action item on behalf of another team member who had left the business.

He called on the customer himself, rather than delegating it, to discuss his feedback and what they could do to rectify the issues that the customer had raised in MirrorWave. During the visit the customer said “Oh I hadn’t heard from you guys in a while and was about to put an order through for 100 (high value) units to someone else. But now I’m talking to you I’ll put that through you guys”.

The GM was of course surprised and delighted about this significant sale that they had nearly missed out on and likely would never have otherwise known about because of the changes in the relationship.