Consultative Account Management: Creating Repeat Business

A big mistake that people make when it comes to offering solutions is not having a thorough, in-depth understanding of their clients before thinking up solutions. Every client’s business is going to run into different problems and circumstances that require a variety of solutions, but tackling those problems at a situational level makes you no better than a vendor.

“The differentiating factor between highly successful salespeople and the more average salespeople is the value they add to the relationship.”

A vendor is someone you engage to transact with minimally, one to three times at most, and there is nothing more to the relationship than simply delivering what the client has asked for. A partner, on the other hand, is someone you transact with for a long time because of a deep working relationship that is built on the client’s trust in your willingness, skill, experience and expert opinion in the industry to guide them towards their vision.

If you want to solve a problem, you have to address the root cause and not just the surface symptom. Many sales and account managers have KPIs that influence them to think short-term and sell everything to everyone just to make sure they hit certain numbers. However, that approach will only allow you to have three transactions with the same client at best before they come to realise that while you may be providing solutions that tackle current issues they’re facing, you’re not actually solving the core issues they have.

The moment they feel that they’re investing more than they should without getting the results they want, you’ve lost a client. You then have to start from scratch with client acquisition to hit your numbers. You’re going to burn out quickly this way. It is much easier to have a core base of clients that you keep in touch with regularly and resell to them than it is to constantly find new customers to sell once to.

In most sales industries, the element of having a core group of clients comes back to the approach of how to resell to them intentionally. That means offering up solutions that directly target their needs, wants, and goals, and not pitching everything you have in your arsenal, hoping to land a shot somewhere. You are neither solving your client’s issues effectively nor building a valuable relationship with them.

This is where the consultative approach comes in – again, how do you turn a one-off client into a returning one?

The core basis of the consultative approach is to understand the needs and wants of the client and making sure that the service and advice you provide is aligned with their goals. Essentially, it is building a long-term relationship by continuously adding value over a long period of time. If you offer services in line with that, you are more likely to have repeat business. If not, you might sell once, but that’s it.

Here are the key elements of the consultative approach:

• Understand what drives the client, what value they want to contribute to the world, their short, medium, and long-term goals, and how they fit in with their industry
• Be deeply knowledgeable and on top of trends and happenings in the industry, their competitors, and the demand for those services
• Understand within this specific company, what they are doing well, not so well, and what can be done differently

Successful businesses tend to be service providers because the nature of their products are long-term solutions that are supposed to add value and improve their customers’ quality of life. That builds loyalty not necessarily to the product, but to the brand.

People who work with these service providers for a long time tend to have the elements of trust and happiness in buying this service. These elements are highly indicative of good relationships between the business and their customers.

What lies behind this success is groundwork that has been laid from the beginning – developing themes, strategies, setting an appropriate mindset and committing to it – that looks long-term at how the business can best offer what it has as a service provider to the client. There is no sense in selling an entire range of services. It is unrealistic.What is more effective is to create services that match the needs of every client. The best companies also understand that there may be customers whose needs can’t be addressed by any of their products. What they do instead for these clients they can’t help at the moment is to understand where the gaps lie so that they can improve their own services with time.

For instance, you may have three products that satisfy the needs of 60% of an industry. This means that in the 40%, there is a gap. There are a variety of reasons why your products can’t serve that remaining 40% – are they too small or too large of a company? Do they overlap across several industries which your product does not account for? What can you do better as a service provider to fill that gap, and where is the opportunity for yourself to grow?

Effective problem solving is not just about temporal, situational solutions. It is also about looking deeper to find that maybe there is a problem B that the client is unaware of that needs addressing. Perhaps there is an underlying root cause of many of their problems that is in their blind spot and all this while, they have been concentrating their efforts in the wrong direction. Perhaps they’re doing well, but you’re able to spot an opportunity that can take their business to the next level, and you manage to point it out and allow the business to leverage on it.

It may seem like this approach is not applicable to vendors and retailers who mostly have a transactional relationship with their clients, but that is not true. The consultative approach is one that needs to be adapted to all kinds of situations and circumstances. For instance, you’re an alcohol distributor. The most basic form of business is to sell a carton and that’s it, you’ve made a profit, and it’s time to make more. Of course you hope to sell several products within the range you carry, or more of a particular product.

Food companies tend to gain new customers by offering free food samples, but customers typically only sample if they already are familiar with the brand or are already an existing customer. So how can you increase your customer base and deepen existing relationships?

This is where the consultative approach comes in. If your client owns a bar, what kind of bar is it? Who are their customers? What are their profiles? What other establishments does the bar have to compete with? There is no sense selling champagne worth $500 to a bar that caters to young 21-year-old adults because chances are, they simply can’t afford it at this time.

It is harder to build longer relationships in transactional businesses because there isn’t that obvious ongoing service. But it doesn’t mean that you can’t create a situation where they choose you as their sole provider for products. At the end of the day, nobody wants to deal with 20 service providers giving 20 different things. You can still become their favourite within what you do.

People tend to think that if a client is looking for marketing, the solution is to offer more marketing opportunities. That couldn’t be further from the case. If you’re a mature and well-established brand like foodpanda, getting customers to reorder is not so difficult because people know of the brand and if they like the food, they come back. What foodpanda needs is new customers, so it only makes sense to offer them marketing online rather than feature and product placements. Having multiple options is nice, but trying to shove all of them down your clients is never the right path to go towards. The key is to fit the needs of different clients so that you don’t run into the risk of being just a vendor and not a partner.

The consultative approach requires you to be a guiding force that can anticipate future complications for your clients, strip their challenges down to a core issue, figure out their blind spots, work through their challenges alongside them, and have a good time together through the process. If you can build this relationship with your customers and continue to solve more problems for them, they will be happy to engage you and are likely to quote you solely for more services and refer you to others.

Essential Skills to Succeed

Since the consultative approach is largely based on building deep relationships with clients, you need to have skills that allow you to get good with people. Listening, understanding body language, reading people, and understanding the psychology of how humans behave is fundamental to any sales or marketing professional. You can’t convince someone to buy or desire something without first understanding what it is they desire.

Listening

Cultivate the ability to connect with your clients deeply, to empathise and communicate your understanding effectively to show them that you are trustworthy. If you’re unable to listen to them and understand their needs, you would just be hard-selling and pushing your own agenda. That breaks relationships.

Analytical Thinking

We’re currently living in an age of data. Raw data is useless, and visual data can be useful, but how it is interpreted determines how far businesses will go. Analytical thinking is the ability to make sense out of numbers, to identify patterns, draw links and insights based on the circumstances and context of the business, and create solutions grounded in reality to aid the client.

For foodpanda, data shows that sales tends to go down in June and the client is concerned and wanting to understand why. As a consultant, you need to know that June is when school holidays start, so families tend to go overseas and will not order food. Or, this period is when parents take their kids out for meals more often, so home delivery is not big during the month.

From that, the next step is to find out when families are going to be home and target family bundles at that window. The data only shows that while the overall sales have dipped, the average size of orders increased.

As a consultant, you may also have field knowledge that the malls tend to get crowded with children during the June holidays, so singles and couples are more likely to go overseas to get away from the crowd. This tells you that people are ordering in groups and not individually. So the next step is to create a bundle for existing groups of people likely to order online and see if that makes up for the loss in sales.

In the past, this analytical mindset may not have been as crucial, but now that technology has advanced to this stage, you’re dealing with millions of transactions and millions of data points each month. You can’t do the traditional method of looking at a book of records and making an assumption from it anymore – you have to constantly be on top of things, observe market trends, consumer behavioural patterns, and draw interpretations from that.

If you’re keeping track of relevant data, you can then collate it into something meaningful and optimise both your consulting business and your client’s business. This skill opens up a window of endless opportunities, and while it is not something you can learn casually on-the-go, it is not restricted and only suitable for people from certain backgrounds, certain degrees, or people with certain characteristics.

Time Management

Time management is something that everybody needs to learn no matter what they’re working as or the industry they’re in. In this context, it would be good to structure your team to let them choose how they would like to work.

Many professionals pick one day in the week where they solely focus on all the outstanding admin work like catching up on emails, reading reports, and logging things appropriately. By handling all this clutter effectively in a day, you free up the next four days for you to concentrate on impact-intensive work – the actual consulting for your clients. You also prevent yourself from becoming a bottleneck and disrupting the workflow between you and other departments you work with.

Hire Wisely

If you’re the owner of a consulting business and you’re looking to expand your team, it might be wiser to tweak your hiring process. Get to know the candidate beyond their resume. Understand their desired career path, what their passions are, look for soft skills and potential they have that could be developed and nurtured, and be open to meeting people from all walks of life.

While it seems as though certain job positions require people of certain personality traits, it is not a hard and fast rule, and people can always prove themselves to be more capable than what their personalities might say about them.

Structure your interview and hiring process according to the kind of people that you want on your team. In this case, it may not be so appropriate to incorporate those tricky Google interview questions since you’re looking for people with high emotional intelligence and a strong ability to connect. So you can ask basic questions to figure out their skill sets like how tech-savvy they are, how good they are at Microsoft Excel, how good they are with numbers, and so on.

But usually, if you’re able to sit with a candidate in a room for 30 minutes to an hour, and have an open, naturally flowing conversation even though you’ve only met for the first time, chances are, that candidate is somebody who is fit for your team.

Build Up Your Team’s Time Management Skills

Time management is important not only to be on top of your own workflow, but also to ensure that you don’t become a bottleneck for others whose work depends on yours being complete. You also need to have good time management in your personal life to make sure that your welfare is taken care of physically, mentally, and emotionally.

Research Thoroughly Before Meeting Clients

You shouldn’t ever go into a meeting blind, and any documents that you bring along should be for your client’s sake, not yours. When you meet your client for the first time, you should already have an understanding of what their issue is and what you could potentially offer to them.

Build a Team Habit of Constantly Learning

For you to be an effective consultant, you need to be on top of industry happenings. Subscribe to relevant industry publications, set Google alerts for whenever new articles come in, and make sure to make it a habit to read at least once a week. Encourage your team to do the same, and share your findings with each other.