Losing the big one

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V Y ("Everything is fine, we're just slowing down a little") or out of the blue ("We've decided to go another way"),losing an important account is a painful body blow to any salesperson.

Elizabeth Kiibler-Ross wrote On Death and Dying in 1969, which gives the five stages of grief we go through when we experience a loss. The book was inspired by her dying parents. The five stages are often applied to the grieving process in dying, but can be applied to any kind of loss, be it a break-up, divorce or losing an important account.

The five stages are:

Denial. I can't believe this is happening to me!

Anger. @7o$! , this can't be happening to me!

. Bargaining There must be something I can do!?

Depression All is lost.

Acceptance. Okay, it's happened. Now what?

Remember the Feeling

Acceptance is important, but as professional salespeople we must hang on to the feeling of the body blow and remember that we never want to feel that way again. How can we avoid ever having this feeling again? By never letting ourselves be lulled into thinking we don't have to prospect.

We must rcalize that no matter how well things are going, we are always in "rainy-day" mode as salespeople. We are skeptical. We do not trust that (our current) accounts will stay with us forever.

Of course, we bring ongoing value and work with our accounts so that they do become lifetime customers, but we always keep a little bit of ourselves working for the time that they might not be. "Pray like only God can help you, but plant your garden."

Self-Analysis

Denial kills sales careers. We need to spend some time thinking about our role in the loss. Some accounts are lost through no fault of our own, but sometimes it is something we have done or said that can be improved upon. If we don't learn from our failures, we will make the same mistakes again.

She's Dead to Me

Now forget the account. Take them out of your account box or Outlook file. Do not circle back with the buyer, even though they may be one of your friends. It is time to move on, and frittering away at the edges of an account that has cut us loose will just delay our developing new accounts.

Action!

Important customers take time. They are also emotionally and mentally demanding. The good news is now we can apply our mind, time and emotion to developing new business.

And we can. We are the ones who found, landed and developed that big account we just lost, remember? That means we already know how to do it. We didn't get lucky. So let's get to it.

. First, we put the full-court-press on our ongoing account base. Go back and re-prospect every account we are currently working and see if there is anything we have missed or any other value we can bring.

. Second, we network with all our current accounts, suppliers and friends to find new business.

Third, we commit to prospecting and do it every day.

No Comfort for Us

Humans like stability. Knowing what is going to happen is comforting. Marketing is built on it. Once people start to buy from or shop in a certain place, they are likely to continue to shop in that place.

That is not the life of a salesperson (or sales organizations). Individually or as a company, if we make a list of our top ten customers five years ago we will see that very few of them make our top ten list today. The same will hold true five years in the future. It is sad to think that the customers we are so tight with today probably (again, we fight it with all we have, but...) won't be our best customers in the future.

We must realize that in reality we are The Big One in our sales careers. We must remember that we make accounts. thev don't make us. Losing the Big One hurts, but it is just a test of our commitment to ourselves and our careers in sales.

James Olsen Reality Sales Training (503), 544-3572