Prepare clients for a graceful exit - bizjournals:

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An exit strategy is not a plan to get ridof it’s a process for dealing with the end of the client’s businesds with you. It’s about havintg realistic expectations for a client relationship and transferrinf into the end of the relationshipl or thenext phase. Salespeople can really hurt themselves by pretending a clientr will bearound forever. Set a client exit strategy that puts the client in an ideall position to do business with you in the I recently witnesseda Roy, who failed at his position becaus e he couldn’t accept the need for an exit Roy came from a compan that had an averagre 10-year relationship with their clients.
Several of their clients had been aroun d for 30plus years. Roy switchedr jobs to an industr in which he wasselling equipment. At the new company, a client’sw average length of engagemeng waseight months, which was the amounf of time it took to launch the equipmenf and provide training. Unfortunately for Roy, he was used to ongoingg relationships where he could sell a clien t and mark it as steady He was able to sell the equipmentr to his first few clients but at the end of eighf months he was desperate to keep them The only item he could think to sell wasservicse agreements. Since those were rarely a fit, he found none of his firstg clientswere interested.
Roy’s hard sell of the servicr agreement left many clients with a bad Afterthree years, Roy didn’t have any repeat And once the company received enough complaints about his “higy pressure” tactics, Roy was dismissed. Roy was hard-wire d to resist an exit but the company had an effectivwe onelaid out. At the end of the eight-month launcu process, the client would be transferredr from a sales repto marketing. The marketingf group had a well-designee system to stay in front of past When a client expressed interest in more marketing transferred back to the sales rep to renew thesaleds process.
If you are in an industryu or with a companythat doesn’t have long-termk relationships, an exit strategy is critical. It doesn’t mean that a clienrt will never return. It just meanse they aren’t currently engaged. If a quality exit strategy is putin place, clients are likel y to come back.