By Ryan Warren, Vice President of Market Development
Understanding your customers has never been more important than it is today. Customers have greater access to information than ever before, which means they have more choices and it’s more challenging to build long-lasting loyalty. But companies need to do this to retain clients long term and generate more revenue. Being customer-focused has its benefits for you as well.
Customer-centricity has four main requirements: recognizing and understanding the differences between each of your customers, realizing the quantifiable value in each individual client, learning who your high-value clients are and how to retain them and utilizing customer data to create a highly personalized experience. Although every person in your organization is responsible for improving customer centricity, your sales representatives need to establish themselves as strategic consultants who play a vital role in your customers’ businesses.
Moving Past “Sales” to Be Seen as an Essential Partner
Sales professionals are usually extroverted and are great at closing deals. But what happens after the sale? Are your reps continuing to check in with clients, or is their contact information just sitting in your CRM? Customer-centric organizations know how to move past the strictly sales mentality to form lasting relationships with their clients. These reps aren’t just people who sell new products and services—they’re viewed as critical business partners who can advise and direct. But your team can’t accomplish this without actionable information.
“A successful salesperson knows how to strike a balance between the science of being a salesperson and the art to match their customer needs,” said Nima Niakan, FirstRain Fellow.
He added that FirstRain can help organizations embrace different methodologies, such as TAS and Challenger, to ensure any information that comes into the organization is analyzed and directed to the right sales rep—the most relevant information in the right platform, categorized under a particular selection based on the methodology. This allows the salesperson to quickly take action on this information.
“FirstRain ups the game for the sales rep and helps them be more efficient with that ‘science’ side of the equation,” Niakan stated.
Bridging the Gap Between Salespeople and Strategic Consultants
While actionable science may seem like a lofty goal to some, companies can’t become more customer-oriented without the right data. So how can salespeople transform their enterprise relationships into more of a partnership?
“By understanding their customers’ ecosystem, knowing what legislative, regulatory and macroeconomic issues are facing their customer and working backwards from there to see how to positions and time the deal to assure it matches the customer’s priorities,” Niakan said.
It can be challenging to establish this type of relationship with your customers, but it pays off in the long run. Being viewed as an essential consultant has benefits in the sales process after the relationship has been developed.
“Once the customer thinks of you as a key partner, now they will come to your first, before looking to a competitor of yours,” he added.
After this trusted status has been gained, the rep can leverage his or her knowledge of the customer to direct clients toward the company’s solutions. This allows customers to get where they want faster, more efficiently and have a desired impact by utilizing your products and solutions.
“The relationship will open a channel for the customer to ask for new features and products that put you in the lead and help you get more ingrained inside the customer’s organization,” Niakan stated.
By Ryan Warren, Vice President of Market Development
In sales, there’s been a lot of hype about the importance of knowing your customers. While it’s easy to talk about, the truth of the matter is companies are struggling to gain insights into their clients’ realities. Although there are a number of tools available to help make sense of all the disparate data sources out there, many sales teams are still getting bogged down with complexity, and that can negatively impact sales productivity. With disrupters entering the market more frequently, businesses need to know their customers and their customers’ market conditions. While this sounds like a daunting task, making processes simpler can improve revenue gains and customer relationships. When you focus on customers, it’s easier to design processes with them in mind.
Stop Using Complexity as an Excuse
New sales methodologies crop up all the time, and it’s pretty clear that some organizations are agile enough to adapt. Despite this, firms need to put customers first. But if companies hide behind the excuse of tricky market conditions, difficult-to-know customers or internal operations, a competitor can easily enter the market and snatch business away, according to an article by Dave Brock for Salesforce. Many organizations default to doing the things the same way they always have.
In fact, organizational complexity can make it harder to solve problems because sales teams or other departments are trying to approach them the wrong way. Some companies have a set way of approaching issues and are afraid to diverge, even when there’s a new opportunity. Brock noted startups are often better at solving problems and addressing clients’ needs because they aren’t stuck in the same rut of taking an established route. Startups don’t necessarily experience less complexity, but they don’t rely on the same approaches all the time.
Simplifying sales methods, processes and organizational attitudes isn’t always an easy task. Past habits and beliefs can prevent team members from seeing the big picture and maximizing productivity. But if your sales reps are spending more time arguing in internal meetings than serving customers, something needs to change. You need to consider things from your customers’ perspectives to make adjustments.
Putting Your Customers—Not Your Pitches—First Will Improve Sales
They say you catch more flies with honey, and your sales team may land more deals by catering to customers’ needs and preferences, rather than having a pitch ready at all times. Although your reps should absolutely know your product or service offerings back and forth, this shouldn’t be the information they lead with. If you want to boost sales, you should address customers first. Talk about them—their companies, their markets—and ask questions rather than just speak, Tom Searcy wrote for Inc. magazine.
In the past, salespeople would go to meetings and talk about why their products were the best, but now your team needs to be more subtle. Don’t be caught selling. Your team can be a lot more successful by focusing on issues related to your clients’ businesses. You can then offer insights into these problems by placing the emphasis on the context of the business, rather than the context of products you are trying to tell. Reps that take this approach wait to be asked to solve the problem. They do not push their own solutions. But expressing this concern about customer pain points helps establish a deeper sense of trust. These salespeople transform themselves into strategic partners and advisors instead of just a contact after the sale.
Market Insight Is Key
Without a firm knowledge of the conditions, competitors and geopolitical events in a customer’s market, your team can’t deliver this kind of service to clients or prospects. Although your customers are more informed about their options, you need to know what they are facing to meet them on their own terms and sell without selling.
By Nora Weintraub
You’re most likely aware you can’t go after a huge target market if you want to create successful advertising strategies. But many companies have trouble segmenting their customer base and generating separate marketing materials for each buyer persona they want to pursue. How can you create more relevant and targeted campaigns? By using customer intelligence, your marketing team can effectively segment your customers and have better knowledge of current and prospective clients.
Especially for B2B organizations, persona-based marketing is critical because many different players are involved in the decision-making process. B2B products often apply to very specific niche markets, so there’s no sense in trying to attract everyone. You need to get the most relevant customers interested in your products or services.
Why Do You Need Personas?
Most would-be customers encounter completely generic content when they research new products. Personas are virtual characters and represent a segment of customers with particular demographics, industries or roles within a company. Knowing your customers can help improve marketing, sales and even product development operations, according to an article by Mike Telem in Business 2 Community. You can more accurately define your ideal prospects and discover what really matters to them, helping you create more effective and engaging content.
B2B purchases typically involve a number of people within an organization, and each of these people will have different concerns. Financial executives won’t have the same considerations for new software as IT managers. And the end users of the product will have different concerns. Without targeting based on buyer personas, your marketing team may not be generating the right amount of leads, and the sales team may not be able to achieve significant revenue gains.
Start Using Personas and Get Better Results
Simply personalizing content isn’t enough, Patrick Spenner wrote in Forbes. While personalization can help companies target individuals, it doesn’t give B2B buying much of a boost when four or five people are involved. The more people in the buying group, the less likely you are to effectively engage all of them with the same kind of content.
In addition to needing more people to decide on a solution, people aren’t going to buy something immediately after discovering your product, according to Irakli Beselidze in a separate post for Business 2 Community. B2B buying cycles can last for years. The consequences of making the wrong decision can be disastrous, so buyers take their time and weigh their options. And even after you make the sale, you want to keep in contact with previous customers for when they need to upgrade in the future. This means you need to create content that targets multiple people, not just the executives with the decision-making power.
Some organizations wait for their audience to give clues to who the decision-makers and key influencers are. But companies need to stop doing this and start focusing on buyer personas to generate more effective campaigns. Rather than just launching content and hoping it provides value to someone in the buying cycle, you need to start studying buyer personas through customer analytics. Watch customer behavior while they are going through the different phases of the sales cycle. Since your customers are increasingly growing more knowledgeable and tech-savvy, you need to convert big data analytics into actionable insight. It can help you more effectively reach all the different people involved in the B2B decision-making process.
By Ryan Warren, Vice President of Marketing
In today’s world of the empowered customer, it’s no longer an option to just tell people your organization is customer-centric. Your sales reps need to uphold this promise by tailoring their approaches to each prospect or client they meet, and this holds especially true for high-powered executive buyers. If your team is failing to cater to this particular group, your organization could lose business in the blink of an eye. Knowing your customers and meeting their specific needs has never been more important.
In fact, Mark Lindwall of Forrester quoted his colleague, David Cooperstein, in his blog, stating, “It’s no longer sufficient to say that you are simply ‘customer-centric’ or ‘customer-focused.’ The only successful strategy in the age of the customer is to become customer-obsessed—to focus your strategic decisions first and foremost on how your customers expect you to engage them.”
Failing to do so is a critical mistake for your organization. Customers have higher expectations than ever before and if your sales team isn’t meeting its clients on level ground, it can miss the chance to strengthen the relationship.
Are Salespeople Missing the Mark with Executive Buyers?
Your sales reps may leave every meeting feeling like they nailed the pitch, but there’s a good chance this isn’t the case. Forrester surveyed a number of executive buyers, and less than 40 percent said meetings with their representatives fulfill their expectations. Lindwall also noted that only 25 percent of salespeople even have access to executive buyers, which means there are limited possibilities for face-to-face meetings. This gap can cripple sales productivity.
Although companies are funneling money into sales onboarding, training and extra development, the missing crucial element could be empathy. Executives want salespeople to express genuine concern and understanding, and if they don’t, your team is losing opportunities by being out of sync.
Even though customers can empower themselves to make informed decisions, sales reps need to be able to walk in the shoes of their customers to be able to maximize every opportunity. You need to understand how each customer perceives value, risk and cost. At the end of the day, executives aren’t really interested in products—they want something that will solve their companies’ pain points. If your sales representatives go to meetings just to discuss key product features, they probably aren’t talking about the things that are truly important to the client and they may miss the deal.
How to Become Customer-obsessed
In two separate blogs for Salesforce, Alice Myerhoff and Matthew Cavnar listed the following tips for getting personal with customers:
1. Use Your CRM Correctly
The more information reps have when they enter the meeting, the more likely they are to deliver the experience the client wants. A simple step like ensuring CRM information is always up to date can make a big difference.
2. Be Responsive, But Keep It Short
Although customer-centricity involves more than just being there when customers need you, your sales reps can’t leave clients hanging. If they can’t respond right away, a short note detailing when they will get in touch can help build trust with executive buyers. However, if you’re getting in touch with these people on your terms, don’t ramble. Voicemails and emails should be short and to the point.
3. Represent Yourself as the Product
Since executives are more interested in problem-solving than products themselves, your salespeople need to create a positive association in the client’s mind. The executive may end up continuing the relationship with the rep for years, so it needs to start by meeting and exceeding expectations.
For more than three years, FirstRain has been delivering big data insights to our Fortune 500 customers through the power of the Salesforce’s Sales Cloud. Today, we are excited to announce an expanded partnership with Salesforce and an upgraded version of FirstRain Customer Insights on their AppExchange.
The more than ten thousand FirstRain enterprise sales and marketing customers that access our service through Sales Cloud will now enjoy an even richer and more deeply embedded customer intelligence experience within salesforce.com. And the deepened relationship between our two companies means enterprise sales and marketing professionals can more effectively tap into the power of social and mobile cloud technologies to accelerate their businesses.
Our expansion into the AppExchange will not force our users to learn a new way of working; FirstRain’s Customer Insights are streamed and embedded directly into the salesforce client to help drive revenue by making every salesperson as informed as your top 10% achievers.
We’ll be showcasing the newly expanded Customer Insights solution at Dreamforce 2013, November 18-21, in San Francisco, California. See you there!
By Nora Weintraub
One of the latest buzzwords for sales and marketing is “the buyer’s journey,” which makes it sound like your customers are going through an epic voyage to purchase your product or service. Without customer intelligence as a backup, it’s difficult to identify the exact steps along a prospect’s path. If your company sells products to other businesses, the journey gets even more convoluted and tangled along the way. Knowing your customers can give you a better understanding of their pain points, how they found your products and what it will take to convince them to make a purchase.
If you ask a chief marketing officer about the buyer’s journey, he or she may have a very different opinion than the customers themselves. And because most people rely on Internet searches to find product information, the buyer’s journey usually begins from an online platform. The average CMO only manages to get a 5 percent email click-through rate, meaning most of these executives fail 95 percent of the time when trying to connect with their prospects during the journey, according to a column by Mathew Sweezey in ClickZ. There’s a definite disconnect between many of the best planned marketing campaigns and what customers are actually doing.
Buyer’s journey is more direct and has fewer stops than marketers think
Yes, it’s true that customers have more ways to reach your sales team and more sources of information on products and services than ever before. But in Sweezey’s research of B2B buyers, he found that the average client only does a few Google searches before making a decision. Although some people start out by asking their peers for recommendations, they will still consult the Internet at some point during their journey.
Many marketers know they need to provide different types of content for buyers in varying stages of the voyage, but some may not realize that the majority of customers prefer shorter reading material. Most prefer a length of under five pages. Companies need to understand what types of information are most relevant to their customers based on the stages of the buyer’s journey.
Shorter trip doesn’t mean you can get lazy with marketing
Although your customers are using the Internet to a higher degree to navigate the road to making a purchase, you need actionable insights to help them along the way. While you may employ a variety of marketing techniques, the end goal is the same: to get to know your clients and form a relationship, Jason Thibeault wrote in an article for Econsultancy. Your organization won’t be able to adequately meet your customers’ needs unless you have a deep understanding of their pain points and create appropriate marketing materials. The Internet has given companies far more ways to market and sell their products, but the basics are the same—personal connections still matter in the digital age.
But that doesn’t mean you can’t leverage customer analytics to form a better picture of your client base. Although the basic point of marketing is always the same, knowing where customers are in the buyers’ journey and how they got there is important to build on the relationship. Marketers that take advantage of chances to make personal connections with their prospects may be able to increase the odds of converting the lead into a sale. Even if the Internet has sped up the trip from prospect to customer, people still want to have a conversation.
The journey may be essentially the same, but everyone is different and may have different communication preferences. The better you know your customers, the more appropriately you can communicate with them, making the whole sales process easier.
By Ryan Warren, Vice President of Marketing
Your sales team is the backbone of your organization. In some cases, sales productivity can improve with training programs, but people who are innately good at selling often have specific traits. As a manager, you need to maximize your team’s capabilities to improve sales productivity.
Characteristics of highly successful salespeople
Even though many people choose to make a career in sales, some have the personality characteristics that make them great at what they do and some don’t. According to an Inc. magazine article by Geoffrey James, the best salespeople are assertive, self-aware, empathetic and excellent problem-solvers. As sales becomes more customer-centric, emotionally intelligent sales reps will become more valued.
Passive salespeople won’t be able to close deals and aggressive reps could scare away potential clients by being too pushy. Being assertive is the happy medium, and reps with this quality may be able to take better advantage of sales opportunities. Empathy is also critical for a top performer because your employees need to be able to understand what your clients are experiencing, such as their unique needs and pain points. And problem solving capabilities can’t be taught. Your sales team can’t rush in and try to solve a problem for a customer before they really know what it is. Great salespeople can help their customers see how things will be in the future once they have solved their current issues.
Hiring for your company’s sales culture
Just because a candidate has an impressive resume with previous selling experience doesn’t necessarily mean he or she is a good fit for your organization. Depending on your industry and customers, the sales cycle may be different and the average deal could vary. Beyond these characteristics, the candidate may be used to a different corporate culture or target audience, according to an article in Forbes by Ken Sundheim. Especially for more complex B2B sales cycles, getting the right person in the position is important. Being good at selling is more than just knowing how to find business opportunities. Reps need to be able to understand their customers to sell effectively.
In some cases, you may be able to determine whether a potential new hire has the right stuff by asking certain questions in the initial interview. You can ask him or her to give a sample pitch, about the relationships they maintained with loyal customers and creative ways they have pursued leads to determine if the candidate would be a good fit at your company.
Giving your salespeople the right tools helps them succeed in various circumstances
Although some reps are bound to be better at selling than others—whether they are more competitive, better problem-solvers, more understanding or what have you—your sales team needs to have the right tools to succeed. In an infographic for Salesforce, Kevin Micalizzi reported that 95 percent of sales reps don’t even understand their employers’ strategies. If you expect your team to maintain personal relationships with your clients and they have no idea about their business, are your reps coming through? It can take a while for an employee to become fully productive, so sales managers need to start training early.
As companies become more customer-centric, it will be more important to hire and develop sales reps that know your customers and can maximize productivity. Organizations that boast a large number of engaged employees can grow profits faster than those that don’t. With the right tools, your team can take advantage of every sales opportunity.
By Ryan Warren, Vice President of Marketing
When it comes to selling, some employees either have it or they don’t. Top performers obviously have the best results, but in many cases, they can still improve sales productivity. Hiring the right employees can help any business stay profitable, but even the most highly motivated workers need to be given the right tools to succeed, especially when it comes to your sales staff. The best employees essentially pay for themselves because they deliver value to your organization. While hiring good people is a sufficient start to maximizing sales productivity, how can you motivate your team to deliver consistently great results?
Employees need goals, systems and processes to meet or exceed their sales quotas. No salesperson can achieve a maximum output in a poorly designed organization, according to an article by Matt Garrett in Entrepreneur. Even though top-performing sales people often go above and beyond the expectations, you may be able to encourage even more results with the right tools and processes. Here are some tips on maximizing employee performance to achieve sales optimization:
1. Tie company profit to each employee
In case you’re unsure, this can be a helpful way to determine your most profitable employees. Who has the highest sales figures? Highest revenue per sale? You can set minimum standards for quality and performance to measure who is doing the best, Garrett wrote. This kind of model can instill a healthy sense of competition among your sales team.
2. Take a blended approach to employee engagement
You can catch more flies with honey, but stay tough on employees for best sales numbers. Many studies have indicated that happy, engaged employees produce the best work. However, if you kill your team with kindness, your representatives may not achieve the sales you want, Jack Zenger and Joseph Folkman wrote in the Harvard Business Review. It’s probably no surprise that sales teams with an ineffective manager tend to be disgruntled and disinterested in producing their best work. The article identified two main types of leaders: drivers and enhancers. Drivers can establish high standards and get their teams to reach for seemingly unattainable goals. Enhancers function as role models and stay in touch with the issues and concerns of their teams. They give regular feedback to help their employees develop to their fullest potential. While some managers want to act as a pal to their employees, as a leader, you need to stand firm in your commitment to holding the team accountable for performance.
3. Set high standards for behavior
You can’t expect great results from your employees unless you’re asking them to do the right things, according to Garrett. The same code may not apply to every employee in the organization because you probably already have workers who meet their quotas month after month. You should only judge your team based on things within their control, such as the number of calls they make per day or the deals they close. Since sales is largely influenced by incentives, performance should be appropriately tied to compensation for extra motivation.
You’re only as good as your salespeople
While you may have a great team of sales employees, your revenue productivity is tied directly to the performance of these workers. Although great managers and the right standards and incentives can motivate your team, they need the right tools in place to close deals and maximize productivity. Reassessing procedures and providing additional coaching can help, but sales reps also need to get a boost from technology to ensure they are following up with customers at the appropriate time.
It seems like Dreamforce ’12 took people by surprise. Refrains of “It’s massive!” popped up all. over. the web.
We obviously now know to expect that Dreamforce ’13 will be just as giant. But what else did we learn last year that will influence how we all exhibit this year?
Side note: if you consider yourself a FirstRain competitor, please ignore this post. In fact, please do the opposite.
1. A successful business is a social business
I bet that if, for some reason, your company hadn’t embraced social media last year, that was the first thing you did when you got back from Dreamforce. How could you not, especially after Sir Richard Branson called you out on it? “For a business to not embrace social media … you’ve clearly got your head in the sand.”
Being on social media not only gives you an easy channel to engage more and different people, it allows you to really connect with people on a more personal level. Nowadays, people appreciate seeing the human side of corporations—and the corporations realized that at DF12.
This year, I expect WAY more traffic on Twitter (and Facebook, and LinkedIn…) and an effort to be more personable and, dare I say, casual—and, hopefully, some very cool ideas coming out of it.
Which happens to segue nicely to my next point:
2. If you want to stand out, you need to get creative
Dreamforce is huge. We’ve established this. So what can you do to make sure to get foot traffic at your booth, which is a tiny (but I’m sure very lovely) island in the Moscone Sea?
We just talked about how people like to see the clever, human side to a business. So if you want to get noticed, you need to get creative with how you promote your company in the run-up to Dreamforce. Recognizing this, for the second year in a row, we at FirstRain have made a Dreamforce-themed video, which is getting a lot of love, and a funny Dreamforce-themed Tumblr (check them out—you won’t be sorry!). We’ve seen other creative videos and Tweets pop up here and there, too (and we love it!).
Make sure you have the material to impress once people want to know more—but getting people to know your name in the first place is half the battle.
3. There are more apps out there than anyone knows what to do with
My prediction: at Dreamforce ’13, there will still be more apps than anyone knows what to do with. And there might be even more than that. Because people have now seen that being able to provide a quick and easy solution to any sort of business need, isn’t just nice—it’s what people expect. Oh, and if they don’t currently have your solution, the only way they’ll consider buying it is if it’s compatible with the solutions they already do use.
Expect to see an explosion of integration at this year’s Dreamforce. Have we mentioned that FirstRain can be dropped in to just about any CRM or corporate platform? And it’s mobile, which is also necessary.
Come visit us at booth #N1924! We promise to have cool swag (free lesson #4).
By Nora Weintraub
You’ve probably already been hearing (and getting excited!) about salesforce.com’s upcoming Dreamforce 2013 conference. The theme this year is “Join the Customer Company Revolution”—but what does that actually mean? To get everyone ready for the largest vendor-led tech conference, salesforce.com has been streaming live conversations with experts about the conference, but before you head to San Francisco in November, you must understand the key aspects of customer companies.
A customer company is completely obsessed with its clients and able to collaborate with them to create a strong brand. By being centered on its customer, the company develops a bond with them based on trust. How can your company do all of this? Now, we’re not going to give away all the insider secrets before Dreamforce, but here’s a few tips to help you become customer-obsessed, customer-collaborative and customer-trusted to truly start understanding your customers before the conference.
1. Customer-Obsessed
If you’re not 100% committed to your customer, what’re you left with? Most likely, a struggling business that just can’t find its market niche—and is suffering for it. Being a customer company means being completely infatuated with your client. This means constantly researching your customers to stay up to date on their business lines, what’s going on in their market and what their customers need. Being customer-obsessed requires your constant focus on providing your customer with the best experience with your company possible.
Doing this doesn’t have to be too difficult. Your company can realign its mission to officially make the business customer-centered and gather customer insights to get started. According to Customer Care News, your company can follow the likes of Apple and Starbucks to become an “experience maker.” Every time you connect with a customer, your company can be focused on creating a great experience.
2. Customer-Collaborative
Part of developing a wonderful customer experience is making sure your customer is able to tell you their opinion or concerns so you have the information to improve the experience. According to the blog Get Satisfaction, customer companies are able to turn negative interactions into positive ones by showing that the company truly understands the customer’s needs and is ready to work on providing them with solutions. This is where customer insights become vital—if you don’t have the knowledge to create that intelligent conversation with the customer, you can’t sell your solution or product. Customers want to feel as if you understand their concerns and can listen to their questions. If your company doesn’t use their feedback—or, even worse, doesn’t value it—your customers may not feel they can trust you.
3. Customer-Trusted
The marketplace is more competitive than ever before, so your business needs to create a positive relationship with your customer to keep their business. Yet you can’t gain your client’s trust if you don’t know them and aren’t able to create an intelligent conversation. It’s because of this growing need to truly understand your customers that the customer company revolution began in the first place. Building trust requires a strong foundation that only customer-focused companies can provide.
Being a customer-centered business is vital to keeping your top enterprise accounts. If you’re not invested in your customer, they won’t invest in you. Creating a lasting relationship with your customers and driving your revenue stream is based on discovering how your company can become customer-focused. Dreamforce 2013 will give you countless ways to do just that, but it all starts with making a commitment to being obsessed with your customer and all of their needs.
