This week I had the privilege of working with a client care software sales renewal group in Maryland. These people are tasked with getting clients to continue to renew their software license maintenance agreements and to uncover opportunities to sell more software.
We had three objectives.
1. How can we find out more information about what the client was doing or planned to do without upsetting our existing contact by going over their head?
2. How can we uncover additional revenue we were unaware of from both the people who paid the bills and the people who did the application development?
3. How can this process be simplified so it could easily be implemented over the phone?
I came up with a set of questions some of which I can share with you. We started off by explaining to the person we were calling that their company was a client of ours. This of course immediately got their attention. They were thinking "Is this a good thing or a bad thing?"
We followed this up with a simple explanation of the purpose of the call which was to let them know that this was a client care call to make sure they received the next release and the latest information on our software. No problems there.
Next came the magic "Is this a good time to speak?" About 9 times out of 10 they person said yes or maybe and began to answer our list of questions. After all, why wouldn't a client want to speak with their vendor?
After making sure that we were in fact speaking with the right person who paid the bills, we asked if they might be interested in gaining a discount and price protection by extending their maintenance agreement over multiple years.
Then we asked if we could help them save them both time and money by syncing up the renewal dates of all there different packages of our software. We usually drew a positive response from this question. This question also benefited us by saving our time and money too so it was a win-win question.
Now that we had our major concern which was the maintenance renewal handled we needed to find the person who actually used the software to find out how it was being used and if there was a need for more software, training or consulting services.
Often the person who paid or approved the bills was one in the same however sometimes it was a different person. Once we were sure we were in fact speaking with (not talking to) the right person, we asked the "money question".
