Research suggests that keeping customers is cheaper than acquiring new customers. Easier said than done: keeping a customer happy and renewing isn’t always a cakewalk for the sales teams.

World-class sales teams—those that hit quota 75% or more of the time—know how to maintain the relationships that keep customers coming back. These tips will make sure your sales teams do, too.

Test your sales team’s performance

Treat your customers well

Sounds simple, right? Consider that a whopping 68% of customers stop buying things because of treatment they receive from a company—and only 14% are dissatisfied with a product or service. In the social media age, this has become even more important. It just takes one broken guitar, for example, to lose thousands of dollars in repeat sales.

Build a complete customer experience

How do you treat customers well? Apart from generally being a nice human being? According to marketing analyst Ray Wang in his webinar Disrupting Digital Business, you use data to personalize their experiences and give them what they want. For example, when a customer calls your office, the person answering the phone should have easy access to the customer’s data—and if that customer is transferred, whoever picks up the phone should have the same data, and a record of the call.

Build customer trust

Wang also discusses the “trust-based economy,” where customers know which companies they want to do business with—and which ones actively hurt customers at every opportunity. How do you avoid a reputation as the latter? Wang’s 5 tips are:

• Personalize experiences for customers using data.

• Operate with transparency. Don’t do anything you wouldn’t want on the front page of The New York Times.

• Build credibility by keeping marketing campaigns truthful, delivering on sales promises, and using positive customer testimonials.

• Make it easy to complain. Seriously. People want to be heard. Let them—and for crying out loud, respond to them!

  Guarantee satisfaction. Ensure your customers are satisfied—and make sure they know you stand by what you sell.

Track data

Last but not least, you absolutely must track data around renewals. Know who’s up for renewal in the next 30 days, how much your renewals are worth—and how much you’ve lost by failing to secure renewals. This will give you insight into where exactly you need to improve.

Meanwhile, see how your entire sales organization performs against the world’s best—and get specific guidance on how you can improve with our World-class Sales Organization tool.

Turn your sales team into rockstars