Background
Air Technologies® has become one of the world’s largest independent compressor distributors and service centers. Despite their growth and success, they’ve never lost sight of how they earned the trust and loyalty of so many customers. While delivering their product and service expertise and quality to customers for over 40 years, they continue to seek ways to strengthen each and every customer interaction. They hired The Relational Capital Group to work with their sales force to build even stronger and more mutually beneficial relationships that could further advance their sales velocity and growth plans.
In particular, Air Technologies sought to:
- Identify new growth opportunities with successful and delighted customers
- Achieve better sales execution, improved leadership abilities, and accountability
- Connect relationship success with business results metrics
- Advance the relationship skills of Air Technologies sales professionals
The Customer Relationship Solution
After carefully evaluating their objectives and existing processes, a customized professional development program was created and implemented for Air Technologies. This program included instruction on the key principles of successful relationships, as well as specific steps, plans and processes that can be used to strengthen relationships with customers every day. These were adopted as standard operating procedures to ensure that lasting behavioral change occurred within the sales organization.
Business Results
After implementing their custom-tailored Creating Relational Capital program, Air Technologies’ customer relationships and business results improved very quickly. Here are just a few examples of their success:
- “Competitor proofed” themselves with a large auto manufacturing customer by creating a “focused strategy for the relationship” rather than emphasizing transactional revenue. This approach resulted in a four-fold revenue increase and improved margins; plus preferred supplier status as additional opportunities arise.
- Turned around a customer relationship that was sliding away to identify new growth opportunities and an unsolicited referral.
- Acquired a completely cold, competitor controlled customer relationship and converted it into a high performing Air Technologies relationship in just 4 months.
- Built a cold call with a competitor’s customer into a new $130k per year Air Technologies account.