In this 5 part series, you'll find a lighthearted guide to enabling sales reps to close more deals.
Click this link for [Part 1]
In a world where poor customer experiences result in major losses due to defections and abandoned purchases, ensuring that sales and marketing teams improve relationships with today’s empowered customers is the key to increasing closing rates. This part of our series will look at a key factor to achieving this: Creating a unique customer experience through customer-centricity. Let’s discuss the various attributes in detail.
- Think in terms of managing the customer experience
Managing the customer experience means understanding how a buyer perceives his interaction with your brand, and then delivering value during their buying journey. Think about this: Marketing generates the leads and Sales closes the deals. And while the two departments have their separate goals and processes, making sure they work together means appreciating what the buyer is going through as they make their way through their buying journey. The problem for many sales organizations is that they are focusing on pushing a single message in order to generate leads. This is what may be termed the “CRM” mentality – a company-centric approach. Managing the customer experience means inhabiting the view of the buyer. From Marketing to Sales, when the two departments manage the customer experience, they are leading the customer towards making a purchase-decision because they are looking at what the buyer really wants, not the push for a sale.
- Walk in your customer’s shoes
The reality is that many sales organizations don’t truly understand what the buyer is perceiving, and in order to succeed this gap must be closed. A part of perceiving the customer experience through the eyes of the customer is by conducting research to figure out what he really values and what his experience throughout the journey really is. Providing value means understanding what the customer is looking for. A truly satisfying custom experience comes from giving value at each touchpoint, and that’s possible by looking at the experience from the eyes of the buyer.
- Continuous learning
The better you know the customer experience you are offering to your buyers, the more in tune you are with their needs. However, to really be effective, you need to continuously work on improving this experience. You need to ask yourself: am I already doing well? In what areas do I need improvement? By focusing on buyer personas, you will work to create the kind of marketing and sales strategies that really connect you with your customers. By continuously studying customer values, the better you can deliver on those values.
Closing more deals is what we all want, and how effective we are in understanding the buyer is a key way to achieving this goal. How effective are you at creating a better customer experience? Are you investing in learning more about your customers to create an effective buying journey for them?
