One of the most effective areas of increasing future business lies within existing customers. The key advantage to capturing this business is that the sales person is already servicing the organization and is considered a "least risk" vendor to the customer. Extending invoices of existing accounts by 10% (assuming satisfactory profit margins) will significantly boost the company's and the DSR's bottom line.

Our case studies, exercises and examples will be based on real situations that relate to your own organization's experience. We gain significant training impact by making programs as realistic as possible.

Areas discussed:

• Increase awareness of potential dollar volume within existing accounts.
• Examine competitive threats that exists where we have not serviced the account.
• Identify obstacles and our advantages to penetrating existing accounts.
• Identify long-term advantages to customer, organization and DSR.
• Examine potential impact on the competition.
• Learn how and why to use "sales coaches" within the account.
• Learn techniques to strategically target products/services and customers.

TRAINING AREAS:

Awareness
Case Study an Acres of Diamonds example

1. Exercise: increase awareness of potential dollar volume within existing accounts
   1. Identify reasons for penetrating existing accounts?
   2. Identify obstacles to further account penetration
2. Exercise to identify invoice items which:
   1. are easiest / most natural extensions to invoice
   2. have greatest margin potential
   3. pose the least risk to customer
3. Identify potential long term impact of minor changes:
   1. On the organization
   2. On customer
   3. On sales representative
   4. On competition

Strategy

1. Exercise: identify competitive areas to be exploited
2. Exercise: identify potential impact on customer
3. Identify profitable potential customers

Tactics

1. Exercise: identify sales "coaches" within named accounts to discover:
   1. concerns
   2. dissatisfactions
   3. needs
2. Develop probing questions to identify needs
3. Develop questions to identify potential consequences and the value of change
4. Develop simple closing techniques to confirm sale

Action Plan

1. Exercise: Each participant develop list of five accounts for further penetration
2. Develop a plan to always have five working accounts for further penetration
3. Exercise: Identify potential impact of penetration activity on sales income and profit
4. Discuss follow-up plan with managers