Sales Myth: If I provide great customer service I will never have to prospect

Sure, that sounds great. Providing great customer service is what every company and salesperson feels they need to be doing.

The sales myth is the more focus that is placed on taking care of existing customers and providing them with great service, the less need there will be to prospect.

The myth becomes the rule when salespeople don’t like to prospect, because to them it’s a perfect excuse to never having to prospect.

The risk of focusing on customer service as your growth engine is you become too reliant on a few customers. It’s a problem that occurs far too often where a couple of customers grow over time to become a huge amount of business to you. When this occurs, you’re locked into them.

Don’t believe me? All you have to do is look at suppliers who go out of business because their one big customer went away.  They may not go away completely, but all it takes is for them to get a cold and poof, you’ve got pneumonia.

Examples of this abound, but one I’ll share is a client that reached out to me for help.   They had allowed over time for their business to become dominated by one customer who accounted for nearly 50% of the company’s total business.

Life was good until the customer was taken over and the new company went with a different supplier. Suddenly the company I was brought into help was laying off people, reducing costs, and doing anything they could to survive.

What made this situation worse was the small sales team had neglected the need to prospect and their pipeline was empty. It was so empty one could argue it didn’t even exist.

Regardless of how much focus you place on customer service and serving your existing customers, you MUST be spending time on a consistent basis prospecting. Call it your sales insurance if you must, but the failure to prospect is simply not fulfilling your mission as a salesperson.

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