Key Learning #1
Delivering a great customer experience before your audience interacts with sales can be key to nurturing and educating leads – Give a greater emphasis to content and marketing.
Key Learning #2
In complicated SaaS products, great customer experiences (pre-sales) can create a connection between audience and company, educate them on your solution and speed up length sales cycles.
Key Learning #3
When in the B2C market, a solid and positive customer experience, based on solving the audiences questions, creates an easier and streamlined purchase.
Let’s face it, the mass amount of messages you’ll receive on a daily basis is overwhelming. Even just focusing on your oversaturated inbox on a Monday morning or after a vacation can be incredibly daunting. On the other hand, we have the other email inbox deviant whose mailbox now has stopped counting how many emails are unread and just says 5000+.
My question here is this; are you adding to the pile of unread emails, budging people for a response or rewriting a catchy headline to catch their attention? And if you answered yes to that question, on average, how many hours are you losing to this email blitz each week?
I know, it is your job to work for conversion, warm up leads and get that all-important subscription. But, are your methods starting to become outdated and are you, in fact, doing the opposite of warming up leads through a continued bombardment?
So, how do we evolve from this? How can we, as a selling business, get in front of prospects to grab their attention in an oversaturated world of endless communication or Anna, who never checks her inbox.
A simple philosophy
Well, wipe that sweat off your brow, because I am about to enlighten you with a simple philosophy – think from the perspective of your customers and how they want to be communicated with. Because at the end of the day, the clue is in the title – experience is about the customer.
This experience can be implemented in many different ways and can give an ever greater emphasis on marketing, content and the nurturing of leads. The trick is to deliver a top-quality experience before your audience even has that first interaction with sales. And this may not be in a day, week or month, especially in the subscription and SaaS world.
Determining when it is the right time for sales to get involved is an important step that differs per company, and let me tell you this, it surely can’t start with the first interaction on your company’s website.
Practical Examples of implementing Customer experience into sales
B2B SaaS
With this example, usually, the software isn’t able to be bought directly from a store or website and requires a greater need for sales, as well as a sales cycle. So how do you approach this? Should sales be contacting leads as soon as an ICP (ideal customer profile) lands on the website?
In a dream world, sales would contact that person and they would say, yes I am ready to be your customer. Yet, the majority of the time, we don’t live in a dream world (I know, insightful, eh!). In fact, the reason for a long sales cycle for such products and services is because of the number of decision-makers that need to be persuaded to make a purchase decision.
What does this mean for customer experience then? Well, simply put, if you are already able to create a great experience for the customer, then it can speed up this process of internal selling. This means creating ease and accessibility of educational materials around your product for not only people to understand your product in greater depth but to help internally build the business case and pitch it to their decision makers.
If you can deliver a great customer experience to an audience who you’ve never spoken to (email, phone, messenger pigeon) physically, then by the time you come to speak with them they are already 50% further through their sales cycle already.
B2C products
Here I am talking about any or most B2C products – Beauty Boxes, Netflix, Clothing subscriptions etc.
In reality, this doesn’t need a lot of time for decision-making on a purchase. But there are factors which will contribute to the success of sales from a customer experience perspective. Here, the focus is on the user experience, the previous reviews from other customers and the simplicity for the audience to find what they are looking for without playing cat and mouse with your website.
An important thing here is to not be too pushy. Chatbots are a great way to overdo it here. If your chatbot is popping up every time the viewer changes tabs or clicks a new link on your website, then this could cause frustration and essentially, set a negative impression of what it will be like to buy your product.
What can positively impact your customer sales experience, however, is the ease of accessing the right answers to the possible questions your viewer may have, and creating an easier, simplistic way to purchase.
One last thing before you go
Not every person who interacts with your brand will have a purchase intent. So, should this audience be treated less than the others? Hell no! Delivering a great customer experience needs to drive further than sales, and bring the experience to all.
The emphasis here should be to create an indestructible brand image, which delivers great experiences to all in the sales cycle, and even those who aren’t. Because one day, who knows, that same person may be coming back and knocking on your door to buy, as they remember that awesome interaction they had.
Your e-commerce success story is just around the corner. Book a meeting now to see how we can help you get started!
