How can Sales Teams Enhance the Overall Customer Experience and Buying Journey?
What does it take for Sales Teams to Improve their Customer Experience?
Today’s customers are more informed than before, they have evolving expectations and more importantly, they are spoilt for choice. Customers today can easily find new vendors and switch product/service providers if they experience any kind of unease or challenge while interacting with a brand.
These are just some of the factors that have made it more crucial for all customer facing teams, especially marketing and sales people to focus on constantly enhancing the customer experience strategies that they implement across their product’s/service’s buying touch points.
What does it specifically take for sales teams to enhance the customer experience across the end-to-end buying journey though? Here are a few tips:
Build your Customer Experience Strategy when Developing your ICP
Marketing and sales leaders allocate fair amounts of time and resources into building out each of their product’s ICPs (Ideal Customer Profiles), this serves as the basis of future marketing and sales plans as well as campaigns.
Without knowing your audience and what influences them, there is practically no use of running any marketing and sales campaign today. It is at this point that sales leaders can actually work on building their ‘’ideal customer experience’’ profile as well, drawing from what customers and prospects prefer and extracting references from brands that boast of above-par customer experiences.
Once sales teams know what kind of customer experience they’d like to offer their prospects and customers across different points of the buying journey, it is easier to build optimal experiences that can live up to that framework.
Read More: 4 Reasons Sales Leaders Should Use AI To Drive Customer Engagement
Capitalize on Real-time Communications
Most B2B sales teams rely on the traditional sales media and outreach mix that includes a bunch of sales prospecting emails, cold calls, social media campaigns if any and similar such initiatives to engage with their target accounts.
Even though sales teams today have access to sophisticated sales technologies and tools that can allow them to plan sales campaigns and outreach at the right time, using the right channel, not every sales leader or team has optimized how well they capitalize on real-time communications to shorten sales cycle and improve the overall customer experience.
A prospect that visits your website for instance and interacts with your chatbot on the home page asking for your product pricing details is in itself a ripe opportunity to capitalize on. Integrating conversational AI systems to connect to sales reps that can immediately reach out to these kind of prospects in real-time not only improves the overall customer experience, it can move prospects through the buying funnel a lot faster.
In today’s time, it is more critical for sales teams to focus on improving lead response times. In fact, recent studies have suggested that over 72% of customers buy from the brands that reply to their query first.
This is where sales teams need to work closely with their marketing counterparts to integrate CRMs/CDPs or other tech stacks that can analyse online prospects and visitors and their behaviour in real-time, when instant notifications are sent to the team to take the next best action on time – it can help convert these prospects faster because of the whole first-move advantage ideology.
Invest in the Right Sales Enablement Technologies
A good CX can make a world of difference and even give a brand that added competitive edge in the market. A recent study by Accenture indicated that B2B companies that recognize CX is a top priority see higher-than-average revenue growth.
Today’s sales teams need better data processes and the right training to use predictive analytics in order to inform their decisions and future interactions with prospects and customers, sales enablement technologies allow sales teams to scale their efforts while building out a customer experience model that meets the needs of their prospects and buyers at the present moment.
Sales enablement tools also allow sales teams to predict near-future changes in customer behaviors, thereby allowing them to stay a step ahead of the game and influence future buying decisions well in time.
Customize every Touchpoint Across the Sales Process
In an online-only era where customers and prospects are not just spoilt for choice but exposed to endless sources and types of information, personalization is fast becoming the most effective way to break through the noise and create impactful connections with prospects and customers. A good customer experience that is personalized across every stage of the buying journey is now becoming a fundamental for marketing and sales teams.
Sales reps need to use their sales technologies to know more about the prospects they are talking to, what stage of the buying cycle the prospects are in, while constantly breaking down the context of their biggest pain points to tailor future purchase processes and conversations.
Successful sales teams that optimize this using demographics, psychographics, firmographics and other data points have been known to achieve higher ROI.
A good CX will ensure that customers keep coming back. When sales and marketing teams successfully build out enhanced customer experiences it automatically leads to a boost in customer retention numbers. Repeat purchases and returning long-term customers are what form the basis of most successful businesses.
In a multichannel, online-first marketplace, there is no dearth of ways through which sales teams can plan and enhance their customer experience. This is why sales and marketing leaders need to have flexible plans and real-time dashboards to constantly assess and optimize their CX processes.
Read More: The Impact Of AI-Based Guided Selling And How It Is A Game-Changer
