“How to Increase Your Customer Base with 4 Handy Checklists” is part of our “Four Quadrants for High Growth Quick Start Guide”. To access the full series click here
Quadrant 1: Increase Customer Base
Overall Goal: Increase the number of your customers by 15%-20% per year
Quadrant 1 Sales is what most companies think of when they talk about revenue growth—increasing your customer base numbers. In fact, many of the companies we work with invest so much time, effort, and money into Quadrant 1 that they neglect Quadrants 2 and 3.
At the same time, most of these companies do not use the most critical strategy for farming in Quadrant 3: Four Funnel Framework. This is the most important strategy for winning new customers because it ensures tight integration of Sales and Marketing efforts. We will discuss the Four Funnels Framework in more detail in the next section.
Below you will find a Best Practices checklist for optimizing high growth within Quadrant 3 for Marketing, Sales, Customer Service, and Innovation.
Marketing Checklist
GOAL: Deliver the necessary number of Marketing Qualified Leads.
KEY OPTIMIZATION ACTION ITEMS:
- Define the marketing content (assets) necessary to drive prospects through the various levels of interest: awareness, understanding, acceptance, preference, and conviction. The marketing assets must deliver the first three stages to generate Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs)
- Build the automation that scores the activities of very early prospects and provides them with more marketing assets until they score high enough to be MQLs ready for handoff to the Tele-prospecting team
Sales Checklist
GOAL: Increase the number of customers by 15-20% per year.
KEY OPTIMIZATION ACTION ITEMS:
- Define the qualification criteria that makes a Sales Qualified Lead (SQL).
- Develop the qualification and SQL acceptance process and build it into the Sales Operations and Sales Automation system.
- Automate the handoff and notification process so that Sales immediately follows up on SQLs.
- Build the right compensation plan that rewards progress through the Sales Cycle so that deals do not get stalled in the middle.
- Build the right comp plan that rewards hunters for getting even small deals in key accounts that have significant upside potential.
Customer Support Checklist
GOAL: Convert new customers to happy and fully satisfied ones within the first 2-3 weeks.
KEY OPTIMIZATION ACTION ITEMS
- Design the new customer onboarding process to be as quick and as painless as possible.
- Develop a scorecard that identifies the components of onboarding a new customer and rates the new customer onboarding team along each component.
- Map the components of the scorecard into the customer support system and processes so that agents can do their work with a high level of efficiency and accuracy.
Innovation Checklist
GOAL: Make your products easy to learn, use, and support in order to free up scarce resources for new products.
KEY OPTIMIZATION ACTION ITEMS
- Review your current products and determine how they can be centralized, standardized, componentized, and optimized so that they are easy to sell, support, and use.
