Instead of Churning, Adapt and Capitalize on Existing Opportunities

Sales organizations win opportunities. Sometimes you unintentionally win nightmare clients, and it is impossible to serve them well.

But other times you win a dream client that is demanding and difficult to serve. These difficult to serve dream clients aren’t on the low end of the business maturity continuum. They aren’t adversarial. They are demanding, and serving them can enable your sales organization to develop new capabilities, new processes, and new offerings.

Instead of doing whatever is necessary to serve these clients, you try to maintain the approach that works for your other smaller, less demanding clients. Your company’s inflexibility or inability to adapt and change to meet the needs of your new, larger dream client causes you to lose the business.

And then you attempt to acquire another dream client in they hope that that they will be less demanding and easier to serve. They won’t be; it’s you.

Love the One You’re With

Your dream client is difficult and demanding. They are going to push you to become the strategic partner that you need to be to serve them, to retain their business, and to create level four value. It isn’t going to be easy, and, in all likelihood, this is why you were chosen.

They are going to demand you best performance. They are going to demand that you hit the metrics outlined in your service level agreement. They are going to expect you to own and deliver the outcomes that you sold and promised.

This means you are going to have to change what you deliver and how you deliver it.

It is your role as the salesperson to lead that change, and leading that change means selling within your own organization. It is more difficult to sell within your own organization than it is to sell outside. Suggesting that your company change the practices, the processes, and the standard operating procedures that allow it to exceed the expectations of other clients doesn’t make you popular.

The status quo has been known to resist even the most valiant change initiatives, and it won’t go down without fight inside your organization either.

Without making the changes necessary to serve and retain your dream client, you lose the client only to begin the long struggle of replacing them. This isn’t how you grow your sales numbers.

A Bird in the Hand

There isn’t an easier dream client. There isn’t a less demanding dream client. There isn’t a special reserve, carefully hidden dream client that provides the opportunity to provide breath-taking, jaw-dropping, earth-shattering value that doesn’t also come with a whole bunch of challenges.

The difficult issues are where value is created; if your dream client were easy to serve without real effort, they could use anybody and achieve the results they need. You become their strategic dream partner by finding a way where others have failed, not by doing work that is equally as poor as the competitor’s that you displaced.

The path to growing your sales is through learning to serve your complex, demanding dream clients. The path to declining sales and declining morale is acquiring dream clients only to lose them through an inability to adapt to their needs.

The next dream client won’t be easier; you would do well to learn to change and adapt in order to serve your existing dream client.