Today more than ever, marketers work to accumulate as much knowledge as possible on the habits and preferences of customers in order to improve conversion rates and help speed up the sales cycle. Tracking customer engagement, identifying top-performing campaigns and measuring marketing initiatives has given marketing the ability to deliver personalized offers and targeted messages based on consumer behavior. And while this has become a standard practice for marketing, the need to gather insights and analytics into the content that gets consumed after the sales call has become the next frontier in sales.
Sales reps that track customer engagement post sales call are able to gather data and develop deepened content resulting in stronger impact on the customer’s purchase decision. A sales force that tracks insights on such channels as email and web portals works to further create targeted content based on customer attitude and behavior. Companies that implement best-in-class sales processes are the same companies that are tracking customer engagement post sales call and are using this data to further generate high quality, targeted messages.
Extending the sales call beyond the face to face interaction
At the Sales Qualified Lead (SQL) stage once a prospect becomes an opportunity, it becomes essential to arm sales with the kind of content that works to close the sale in the follow-up stage. The follow-up process is critical. It could mean the difference between a lost opportunity and Won Business. This is why this stage of the sales funnel requires deeply targeted sales content; content which contains the right message, targeting the right customer, delivered at the right time, using the right channel. Whether via email or published content in a web portal, it is the quality of the content that gets consumed after the sales call that’s just as essential as the marketing stage, itself.
Getting the most out of Insights and Analytics
Enabling marketing by helping it understand what’s driving sales works to strengthen the sales force. Gaining visibility into which content is read more often or opened more often, which pages visitors spend more time on and do they click back on other links - all these insights provide the kind of data that improves the sales process. Using data analytics to categorize customers based on their product preferences and sales cycle stages allows marketing to segment prospects and deploy targeted marketing campaigns that work to enable sales to close more business.
As data gathered post sales call gets fed back to marketing, it helps marketing refine the engagement process. Companies that implement best-in-class sales processes are the same companies that are tracking customer engagement post sales call and are using this data to generate high quality messages and valuable, targeted content.
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