Think beyond products and services to build the net worth of your company
Let’s put on the glasses of your company’s future acquirer. They are going to look very closely at your revenue and the customers that generate it. They will want to fully understand your sales model for attracting and retaining customers so they can be confident that not only will existing customers continue purchasing, even if the acquirer takes over, but also looking to see if you have a scalable sales model for adding new customers and growing the business even further.
To excite them that your sales model is effective today and scalable for tomorrow, think about how you manage your customer relationships and turn this into a well-thought through, well documented standard operating procedure. Picture the day you’re discussing your sales model with the acquirer and being able to excite them because in addition to selling your products and services, you’ve actually created an additional product of value and that is how you identify, attract, retain and nurture your company’s customer relationships. In other words, you have built a new product and it’s one that makes you very sticky with your customers.
Build your customer relationship product by sitting with your sales team and discussing/documenting what you’re doing every day, at a step by step level, that has your team finding, onboarding and nurturing customer relationships. Discuss and develop your playbook:
- How do we decide where to deploy our sales team – what geographies, what markets, what specific customers?
- How are we deciding which customers we do and don’t want to do business with? Have we profiled an attractive target customer and a customer type we don’t want to do business with (i.e.: lower margin customers, don’t pay their bills on time, require you to tie up your working capital for their benefit, difficult, high maintenance customers, etc)?
- How do we identify the decision maker at our target customers?
- What steps do we take to attract the decision maker to want to purchase our product or service? What have we learned in terms of what works and what doesn’t work related to conveying our value proposition and unique selling proposition to the decision maker(s)?
- What is our process for building and communicating our sales proposal to the target?
- What is our process for onboarding a new customer?
- What steps do we take to ensure we retain and nurture the relationship as we work with the customer?
- If the customer we built a relationship with leaves our current customer and moves to another, what steps do we take to maintain contact with them to try and attract their new business?
- How do we think our customer relationship management is better than our competitors?
- Are we able to show over time that decision makers have repeatedly selected our company for their business needs so we show we are sticky with customers?
As you think about these questions, the answers can help you begin to build your documented sales playbook. This playbook can then be used to accelerate the training of new salespeople and will be helpful during the acquirer’s due diligence to impress them with the product you built around how you manage customer relationships. This could help support you asking for and receiving a premium valuation for your company at time of sale because the acquirer will see you have a proven customer relationship playbook that they too can leverage.
