Successful sales is about more than hunting for new opportunities. Farming accounts to build and grow existing relationships is just as important as impressing customers with your deliverables. Language service providers (LSPs) often fail to move beyond standard project management interactions. Salespeople are busy going after new buyers while the production team concentrates on project deliveries. In the meantime, competitors loom to steal your business.
Establishing a formal account management function is the answer to preventing attrition. An 80% client retention rate means that you virtually turn over your entire customer base every five years. At 95%, that number extends to 20 years. Farming existing accounts is cheaper than hunting for new ones.
But it also has other perks. A formal customer care program improves the outcome of natural relationships. By nurturing the client and leveraging the relationship, you can increase the account size beyond what it would be without an extra push while at the same time increasing your profitability.
Clients demonstrate a desire for customized care. The buyer’s level of localization maturity should be a principal factor in determining the appropriate attention. That being said, customers across the board show the same basic desires: speedy response times, dedicated contact points, and true collaboration.
Our research shows that LSPs can’t grow reliably unless they systematically manage their customers (see “How to Drive Translation Sales,” Mar11). But formal customer care is still a newer function in the language industry – even large LSPs still struggle with how to achieve the best results. Our new report “An LSP’s Guide to Account Management” draws on the best practices we discovered in our interviews to help you select top accounts to nurture and to set up the staffing structure to support a client care program.
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