“There is nothing so terrible as activity without insight. — Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Leveraging all your customer information is the only way to succeed in the world of B2B sales today. Having the right tools in place makes it easy for sales professionals to understand when they could sell which product to which customer and how.
This type of customer and product knowledge is not only valuable for new hires, but also for more seasoned sales reps, especially when customers are re-assigned to different sales professionals, or when contacts on the customers side have changed.
Insight is one of the key points of a differentiating, personalized customer engagement approach, considering:
- Deep understanding of your customers and the key contacts, recognizing their buying behaviors, wants, needs, and expectations
- Demand signals for event-driven, contextual customer engagements, powered by predictions
- Solution and value selling instead of selling just product features and functions
- Collaboration with all relevant internal experts, partners, and customers
- All relevant information available anytime, anywhere on any device for every type of customer interaction
- Channels of choice for your customers and partners, in a true omni-channel environment
Empowering sellers with deep customer insight
To gain deep insight into customers and contacts, sales professionals need to leverage all available, relevant company-wide customer information plus all valuable information from external sources blending transactional and social information to enrich the views of the customers.
Sales reps want to anticipate customer behaviors by discovering hidden trends, understanding motivations, and gaining insights into customer sentiments with predictive analytics. For a productive analysis, sales professionals appreciate easy-to-use tools that can analyze information in real time and show results in an easy-to-understand manner.
To make sure you’re on top of today’s mobile trends, provide all relevant information in every step of the sales cycle with embedded analytics, on every type of device. This is especially important for new sales professionals or for veteran sales reps.
Event-driven, contextual customer engagements
New technologies help your sales and marketing organization consider every relevant visit to your physical and digital channels to drive event-driven, contextual 1:1 marketing and customer-engagement activities. Leverage both implicit and explicit customer information and signals, and use real-time contextual information to target at the right point in time.
You can also use predictive tools to provide the right offer to the right customer with the right information in the right point in time, and anticipate customer wants, needs, and buying behaviors.
Digitization
Digitize all valuable information for your customers to make it easy to analyze and share it using modern collaboration tools for use in context. Ensure that your customers can easily deal with you, by uploading digital information such as photos, drawings, or videos when your customers are interested in similar products, spare parts, and service offerings and want to use a self-service environment. All these points will help you get additional valuable information and signals from your customers, all key success factors for your next customer interaction.
Mobility
New mobile solutions ensure your sales professionals have access to all the information they need, anytime and any where in the office, during customer calls, when traveling, at home, and on their preferred mobile devices. Make it easy for them to capture new information about and from their customers, in every interaction on every channel.
Digital channels
Consider every physical and digital channel requested by your customers (and partners) as a means to provide valuable information and self-services. In other words, make it easy for your customers to do business with you. Digital channels will help you gather additional information from your known customers or anonymous prospects, and can also help signal which channel you should use to trigger an activity in context.
Manufacturing brands that take all of this into account will not just meet or exceed customer expectations, but also will also increase the productivity of their sales and marketing teams in order to:
- drive profitable growth in a challenging market
- provide transparency, including reliable forecasts
- enhance customer (as well as partner and employee) satisfaction
These benefits occurin every channel and at every sales location, including smaller subsidiaries. The key objectives sales and marketing executives are measured on can all be improved with a laser focus on customer engagement and commerce.
