Retaining customers—especially top spending key accounts—should be a top priority for B2B sales consulting firms. World-class firms retain at least 90% of their customers from year to year; however, not all firms exceed this lofty benchmark. 

Many firms get distracted with other seemingly important tasks like new customer acquisition and forget about taking care of their existing customers. Don’t get me wrong, both are important; however, attracting new customers will cost your company five times more than retaining existing customers. 

Five times… that’s a big number! Think about the last time you sold to a new customer—it is easy to remember the dollar amount of the final deal and easy to forget all the hoops you had to jump through to close the deal. Here’s a great video that sheds a humorous yet painful look on the pricing element of closing a deal with a new client—take a couple of minutes to watch it, you’ll be glad you did:

5 Things World-class B2B Consulting Firms Know About Customer Retention 

The best B2B sales consulting firms know the secret to client retention involves the following elements:

• Content is king! Providing customers with up-to-date sales training resources that help improve sales performance is a must have. The tricky part is finding the time to develop content. Some firms have the resources to do it on their own, while others outsource content and use a partner program that utilizes sales training resources and materials from other established firms.

• Establish a common language and use it consistently. An example of this is the use of an account list management system that classifies accounts by spending level.

• Discuss best practices and use them as an example when teaching a new concept. People like to hear stories so don’t forget to tell success stories and tie them back to best practices.

• Combine training and selling by involving exercises that include work with real customers. Additionally, conducting a post training sales initiative tied to a concept makes a great deal of sense. For example: If you teach about the concept of setting appointments, follow up the training with an initiative to set appointments with new customers—set a goal and track the number of appointments set by each seller and track the revenue developed from each appointment.

• Make follow up visits focused on reinforcing the fundamentals taught in previous training workshops. Lay a foundation and build on it every time you conduct a workshop.