Protect Your Best Accounts

from pa ge 62 ) can be devastating to your business. That should be enough reason for you to give special time and thought to this question.

But losing a good account impacts your business in additional negative ways. The individuals within your good accounts are typically those people who provide you special insights into what your competition is doing and what is happening in the market. Lose one of those good accounts, and you lose some of that special insight.

Your good accounts are the first places you take your new products and services. They provide you ready acceptance and honest feedback for your new offerings. You hone your presentations and sharpen your approaches because of the feedback provided by your good accounts. Lose one of them, and that special function they provide is also gone.

And then, of course, we all knew that your good accounts are the places where you make the greatest financial return for your time invested.

So, it pays to think more deeply about how to vaccinate your good accounts from the competition's enticements. Here are four proven strategies to help you withstand competitive onslaughts.

1. Deepen and broaden your relationships.

It is difficult for your good friends to take their business away from you and give it to someone they don't know or trust as well. Not that it can't ever happen, but if you have great relationships with the key people in your good accounts, if you have turned them into friends and not just business acquaintances, you'll put a layer of protection between you and your competition. So, you need to focus on turning the contacts in your good accounts into friends by deepening and broadening your relationships.

To deepen the relationships means that you work at enabling the key people within your good accounts to know you and your company better. Take them to lunch, go to a ball game together, create an opportunity for them to meet your spouse and vice versa. Turn them into friends.

Extend the relationship to include the rest of your company. If possible, bring a number of the key people in your good accounts into your facility to meet some of your company's other employees. Take your boss, operations manager, and customer service people into the account to meet them. The more comfortable they are with your company, the more of your people they know, the less likely they are to seriously consider the enticements of a motivated competitor.

To broaden the relationships means that you make sure that you know more of the key people within your key accounts, and that they know you. Be methodical. Make a list of all the important contact people within a good account. Then carefully evaluate the state of the relationship you have with each of them.

If there are important people who don't know you, fix that quickly. Make sure that you have positive relationships with your key contact's boss, and the boss's boss. Work as high up the hierarchy as possible.

While the depth and breath of your relationship isn't a

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