Episode Transcript
Alex Chan | Paul O’Donohue
Here’s a question for you. If you’re a business owner or CEO, are you recession ready? This is the first of a series of critical strategic plays that as a manager, you might want to consider implementing in your business. Now, to join us to help us through this discussion is CEO and founder of SalesStar, Paul O’Donohue. Paul, welcome back.
Thanks, Alex.
Paul, When we face a recessionary climate, there are certain key strategic plays that we need to really think hard about putting into practice. And one of them is account retention as a primary strategy, isn’t it?
Yeah. Protect everything you have. Ringfence your clients. This is super expensive to win new clients. So we have got to. We’ve got to love the ones we’re with. We’ve got to over service them. We’ve got to go from the trusted advisers to the trusted carers. And we’ve got to make sure that they’re multi locked and that we’re looking after them. If we’re not looking after them Alex then someone else will be knocking on the door to do that.
You point out a number of really good gold nuggets there. Firstly, I love what you said about going from Trusted Advisor because everybody’s saying that phrase aren’t they; trusted advisor. But you mentioned going from trusted advisor to trusted carer. You know, during the lockdowns when we had the pandemic that started a few years ago. A lot of clients did that and they were phoning their customers just to make sure they were okay and to see what could they do to help them to get through. That’s what we’re talking about in recessionary climate, isn’t it?
Yeah well, clients don’t really care how much you know, they want to know how much you care. So, you know. Your company the ones that reach out to them when things get tough? Are you there to advise them, to support them, to really understand how you can add value to their business and get them through some tough times? Because if you are, they will always remember that. They’ll always remember those that stuck by their side and those that cared for them and those that helped them mitigate through some really uncertain times. So if you can do that, you’ve got a client for life.
Thank you. Now, you also mentioned a really great topic that I’m passionate about, and that is the subject of multi-locking. Can you just explain that for the benefit of our viewers in case they’re not 100% clear on what you mean?
Well, so one of the biggest risk with our key accounts of, you know, I can see some CEOs wriggling in their seats right now. It’s the over dependency on having your salesperson have that key relationship with your key accounts. So what if your salesperson found another job. Got hit by a bus. What would happen to that relationship? Moreover, what happens on the other side of the affair? The key stakeholder that your salesperson has a relationship with gets made redundant, will get hit by bus. So, you know, multi locking is mitigating the dependency on single relationships. So the way in which we do that is we multi-lock your key accounts with key relationships from the supplier to the customer. So have a think about you as a leader in the business as CEO. Do you have key relationships with key people on your key accounts? Do other senior managers have key relationships? And I know many of our key accounts, we’ve been put under duress with, you know, a key salesperson leaving a key coach leaving. But because we had multi-locked that account through CEO, through through the practice partners, through client services and with other coaches and account managers, those accounts were secure because we had good relationships.
Yes. So that was a really good example. Using the SalesStar way, how our client can have multiple relationships with multiple stakeholders within SalesStar and we too with multiple stakeholders within their company? I wonder if our viewers could maybe take the time to review there situation to see if they’ve locked up their key accounts or multi-locked their key accounts in the same fashion, Paul?
Don’t leave it too late! You don’t have to wait for a recession in order to do that. You know, if you don’t if you haven’t multi-locked your key accounts, swing into action. Now get a wriggle-on. Hey, look. And to make it easier, we’ll provide the strategic key account plans and orders for you to help you work your way through that process.
Okay, so our viewers can go to the link below. They can download the strategic account plan, that’s a fantastic offer Paul. So thank you very much for that. So to our viewers, remember, when times are tough and in a recessionary climate, have you looked at as a key strategy to securing the accounts that you have? Thanks for joining us today. Remember to keep on following this series on making sure that you’re recession ready by following key strategic moves that we can make in a recessionary climate. And remember, if you’d like to know more. Reach out to us SalesStar High-Performance coach, because we’re here to help. We’ll see you at the next session. Bye for now.
