Have Changes in Buyer Behavior Made Your Sales Process Obsolete?

In today’s market, no organization can avoid coming to grips with the rapidly evolving behavior of consumers and business customers. More than ever before, both B2B and consumer customers are empowered to make themselves heard. The voice of the customer is more powerful than ever before in leveling the competitive landscape – making it more important than ever to have a strong customer engagement strategy.

Rising customer expectations are making it an imperative for sales teams to meet the challenge and add value to the buyer journey. To meet these rising expectations, it requires a new approach to sales strategies and priorities:

The Customer is King

Face it, without your customers you have no business; and everyone knows it’s easier (and cheaper) to keep your current customers happy than to acquire new customers.

Getting laser focused on your customer starts with your company culture and ensuring your customer support team is empowered by and shares your focus on providing an amazing customer experience. Think about your business model and how you can best service your customers.

Think Customer Engagement, Not Sales Cycles

Customer engagement is about encouraging your customers to interact and share in the experiences created for them as a business and a brand. When executed well, a strong customer engagement strategy will foster brand growth and loyalty.

Get Your Sales Team in Sync with Your Marketing Team

Sometimes marketing and sales can seem worlds apart, but that should not stop you from striving for tighter integration. A 2013 Marketo Sales and Marketing Alignment Study shows that when sales and marketing teams are in sync, companies become 67% better at closing sales deals and generate 208% more revenue from marketing activities.

Data is Your Secret Weapon

With customers more empowered – and more demanding – than ever before, marketing and sales teams must work together to simplify the complexity of data, processes, marketing channels and insights.

A recent research report from Aberdeen Group (From Lead to Close: Best-in-Class Sales Acceleration Techniques That Win, November 2014, www.aberdeen.com) outlines several sales enablement tools that best-in-class sales organizations are in investing to improve performance. Their research shows that these best-in-class strategies result in 32% higher team attainment of goals than all others (84% vs. 54%).

Sales teams who want to excel in meeting the expectations of today’s customers need to stop thinking about sales cycles and start thinking engagement. Download our whitepaper, Four Key Principles for Sales Success with Empowered Customers, to learn how your sales teams can remain relevant in today’s markets and profile higher-value engagements that meet and anticipate customers’ current and future business needs.

by SBS Group