Increasing Enterprise Value by Expanding your Customer Base and Diversifying your Revenue Sources

Every distributor hates losing a large, important customer to a competitor. Unfortunately, small to medium sized distributors face above-average risk if a large portion of their sales are concentrated in a small group of key customers.

You work hard to get a large client, but the erosion can happen slowly over time if you’re not managing the relationship and watching data closely. Expanding your customer base automatically diversifies your sources of revenue to minimize your risk and safeguard your growth plans.

Data and Visibility Fuels Growth

The key to expanding and keeping your customers lies in data and visibility. SMP give you visibility into all of your customers. That means you can easily identify changes in buying behavior that can lead to new growth opportunities or stave off competitive encroachment. For example:

• Manage new list sources from events and digital marketing initiatives to grow you customer database.
• Create a marketing list of customers who have fewer than five transactions to turn infrequent customers into loyal customers.
• Create a list based on purchasing behavior to upsell complimentary products.
• Profile your most profitable customers to identify new areas for profitable growth.
• Send out thank you and follow up emails immediately after purchasing to encourage more purchases and provide support.
• Send monthly newsletters to everyone in your database to let them know what specials and new products you have in each location.
• Target online-only buyers with offers to visit your branch locations – training, demos, pizza and more.

Manage Interactions

Once you’ve started building out your database of customer, SMP gives you tools to manage your interactions with customers and prospects. As the leading distribution-specific CRM platform, SMP is built for the way your team sells. It integrates with your ERP application to leverage important information such as accounts, contacts, and transactional data. SMP includes native mobile applications along with dashboards to provide important analytical data to help management understand and direct their sales staff. This makes managing interactions with your new customers intuitive and fast.

Activity tracking inside of SMP allows you to add tasks, log phone calls, record customer meetings and log information requests for yourself or for others in your company. You can easily review the activities for each customer and associate those activities with the responsible contacts in each company. Managers can easily report on and view activities to quickly understand activity levels and status. And of course, SMP makes it easy for you to view, manage, collaborate, and coach large sales cycles with opportunity management and pipeline visibility.

Measure and Replicate Success

Finally, SMP gives you the ability to measure success so you can repeat winning plays across all your markets and sales reps. Our customers have called SMP “a sales coach in a box,” because it facilitates measurement and coaching so easily. With data visualizations, your reps will know exactly the right plays to run at the right times. Your sales managers will have all the data the need at their fingertips to better manage your reps and coach them to success. And with automation, you will close more open bids and quotes than ever before.