Authentic relationships and buyer trust are at an all time low. The Pandemic forced us apart, we resorted to digital tactics to stay connected to each other, to our loved ones, to our colleagues - and of course to our leads and prospects. And in the process we have burnt them. Now it's time to reconnect.
Digital fatigue has never been higher. Sales email open rates have never been lower. Google has never seen so many searches not result in a click through. It's time to rebalance the books in favour of re establishing a genuine human centric connection, to treat your leads prospects and customers as humans not data points.
Here are four founding pillars to doing that well. Let smart, connected technology perform the heavy lifting, so your people can focus on what they do best; Creating a genuine, valuable connection with your prospects and customers.
1) Help first, then sell. Be empathetic, humble and sincere in your efforts to help your leads and prospects. Share your time, expertise, content and tools generously. Help prospects understand and size up their challenges. Help them build their internal business case, understand the ROI they could achieve. Smart selling organisations have realised most organisations have many people involved in the buying process. They need help synthesising all the information they have gathered so they can make a decision. So selling is more about helping organisations buy than about pushing your solution.
Tip: Refresh your thought leadership content. Is it genuinely helpful? Does it help them with a part of their buying decision? Have you considered generating quality market research and sharing the results with the buying community? Helping a prospect benchmark their performance to their competitors is an excellent way to trigger a buying journey. Keep top of the funnel thought leadership style content ungated, offer it without any strings attached.
2) Focus beats breadth, or as I recently heard it more more colourfully described, "The riches are in the niches!" Linked to being genuinely helpful is being focused on market niches or segments. That's because being focused on one (or several) niches means you deepen your understanding of your buyer's world, you can solve for the customer's problems better as you know them well. Your value proposition becomes targeted and crisper, you speak their language, their vocabulary. And of course you can refer to other customers you have helped in the niche to which they belong.
3) Use relevant data. Connecting data that straddles the full lifetime of the customer, in other words from stranger to lead to customer to loyal advocate, is one of the most important founding pillars of an organisation. Connecting your separate puddles of data into a single data lake allows a marketer, a salesperson or customer service executive to understand the specific customer's world and their experience with you. It allows you to respond in a more personal relevant way. In aggregate this allows your organisation to make much smarter decisions, helping you invest in the most effective tactics, speed up your sales cycle, increase retention and loyalty rates.
Tip: Don't sit on your laurels, what data is relevant last year, or for last quarter's campaign, may not work next year. Constantly evaluate your data reporting.
4) Use your customers to sell for you. Your happy customers are your best salespeople. They power your marketing and help your salespeople close. Make sure you know who are your most happy, satisfied customers. Equally the jungle drums of the internet will spread bad news faster than good news, so ensure you have a watertight process for handling customer complaints or an escalation process if you receive a low NPS score.
Tip: Build a formal customer advocacy program in your business and ensure you have an NPS or similar survey mechanism for measuring customer satisfaction.
5) Invest in a platform that ties together your marketing, sales and service teams.
Let smart connected technology perform the heavy lifting, so your people can focus on what they do best; Creating a genuine, valuable connection with your prospects and customers.
Tip: Put a CRM at the heart of everything you do. Capture all interactions with your customer over their lifetime with you in a single place. Data and two way communications from marketing and sales activities as well as customer service teams should all feed into the same central customer record.
Want to chat to us about how to build these foundations? We'd be happy to help with an absolutely obligation free discovery session with our experts.
