Simply stellar: Building the best B2B buying experience

B2B SaaS businesses strive to stand out against the competition by offering quality solutions, cost-effectively. But success today hinges on more than product. Driving consistent sales requires simplifying and streamlining the B2B buyer experience.

Leading SaaS companies cater to customer needs and address their issues. This is possible through customer interactions, timely services, sharing the brand message, and honing product quality.

Driving memorable, meaningful customer interactions can speed growth and boost market share. An effective buyer experience enables SaaS businesses to:

• Get a leg up on the competition with high customer satisfaction. Loyal customers can turn into evangelists for your brand.
• Turn leads into customers. CPQ software can help streamline B2B buying by ensuring that your solution configuration closely matches your prospects’ requirements.
• Make data-backed decisions when updating an existing product or launching a new one.

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5 ways to build a seamless B2B buying experience

B2B buying has traditionally involved long, complicated processes. But today’s B2B buyers expect the same kind of speed and convenience expectations they get as consumers.

To meet their needs, B2B SaaS companies should consider these steps for boosting the buyer experience:

1. Break departmental silos
2. Deliver personalized CX
3. Enhance onboarding
4. Educate buyers
5. Collect customer feedback

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Silo busting for better customer experiences

The lack of a unified approach may create glitches in the B2B buyer experience. Different departments in your organization should approach CX with single objectives, assumptions, and data.

This helps avoid employee dissatisfaction, communication breakdowns, damage to company culture, and poor experiences for your customers.

Here are the few signs that indicate that your departments are siloed:

• Customer complaints when their experience with a B2B SaaS product falls short of their expectations.
• Your sales team tries to upsell the customer on a product that the customer already has.
• Different customer support reps provide buyers with conflicting advice.
• Product enhancements only aggravate customers and degrade their overall experience.

Optimizing the buyer’s experience requires cross-departmental collaboration and setting product goals and metrics. This requires team leaders to develop a plan to share knowledge, and encourage employees to adopt collaborative processes and technologies.

For instance, product managers may work closely with their counterparts in customer service, share data and gain insights for future product iterations. It also involves conducting UX audits and monitoring customer satisfaction.

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Prioritize personalized CX

Create buyer segments to provide buyers with personalized experiences. This help you understand their motivations, needs, and behavior patterns, which in turn helps to identify ways to improve engagement.

Customer segments help identify key patterns between the types of buyers you have and create a strategy to approach these buyers.

Providing B2B buyers with individualized service improves the chances that they’ll become return customers.

Marketers can craft meaningful customer experiences across different stages of the buyer’s journey by keeping them relevant and useful. Ideally, this includes customized support, engaging content, and establishing two-way connections.

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Don’t make them regret it: Boost onboarding

Customers who purchase a SaaS product go through an onboarding experience. Onboarding should make your products familiar to customers and show their true value. It should demonstrate to the buyer that they’ve made the best decision and give them confidence that you’ll listen to them in case they need help.

B2B SaaS companies should make buyers comfortable with the UI and image display and streamline other functions.

An ideal SaaS onboarding should:

• Offer a complete set of instructions, a self-help FAQ section, a knowledge base, and support contacts to help users overcome any challenges while using the product.
• Provide free sign-up and trial periods to win customers and provide the groundwork for lasting partnerships.

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Help B2B buyers succeed

Offer free training content that provides value to buyers, ensuring a satisfying experience. This helps improve brand recognition, drive customer loyalty, facilitate learning, and establish a relationship with your product.

Driving such awareness requires the involvement of customer success teams and product managers. Together with marketing teams, they can create educational product-focused collaterals.

Optimizing this content involves:

• Keeping it relevant. Identify customer pain points where your clients are struggling and tailor the content to alleviate those issues accordingly.
• Listening to customers and responding. Make sure you understand buyers’ expectations and consider that while creating content.
• Provide a self-service customer portal. Besides providing quick consumable content like blogs, articles, and videos, provide access to a knowledge base or learning site to help them study your product, find solutions to common issues, and access other useful information to enhance the user experience.

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Listen up: Collect customer feedback

The next step in enhancing the B2B  customer experience is listening to them. This involves implementing customer feedback strategies by designing interactive surveys, conducting interviews, and taking informal feedback.

For starters, here are some key methods to get customer input:

• NPS surveys: These help gauge customer loyalty to a brand. A single question is posed to multiple people who are asked to rate the business on a scale of 0 to 10. All the responses are then used to come up with an NPS score.
• CX surveys: These attempt to gauge customers’ perceptions of a brand via a series of rating-based questions.
• Social listening: Leverage social platforms to analyze customers’ sentiments on social media based on how they react. Use tactics like social media analytics, brand mentions, and social SERP, for the same.

Building customer relationships for the long term

Implement a well-thought buyer experience strategy based on their opinions about your business, products, and brand. Begin by nurturing current customers and leads by learning their habits, likes, dislikes, and brand expectations.

By enhancing a buyer’s journey, you’ll build customer relationships that last.