Thursday, May 2, 2019

4 Human Touchpoints of Sales with Customer Relationship Management


By now we all must know what is CRM software and what it stands for.

We all are aware that easy to use CRM software platform helps sales organizations to keep track of their customers and thereafter manage the leads as it moves through the sales pipeline, which ultimately makes sales more effective and easy for the sales reps in your company.

Now, while best small business CRM software and many other Salesforce Alternative CRM solution technologies along with Salesforce CRM help in continuing to make this sales process easier, there is practically as-of-now no way to make the human-touch completely automated that is needed to provide an effective sales.

Hence, in every single step of your sales process, it is necessary that you should establish a direct contact to educate your purchasers, inform them of your offerings and most importantly establish trust with the buyers of your products and services.

Therefore, in this article let us dig out what are the precise things that you should be performing to ensure that your sales reps are hitting each of these crucial touch-points, help your buyers to guide them towards a decision, and finally deepen your relationship with potential buyers of your offering in your CRM database on the way.

1. The Potential Customer Makes Contact

The very primary touch-point in this list is the very first opportunity that you find to create a connection with your prospective customer during their initial contact with your brand.

At this juncture, mostly the purchaser visits your business website and shows interest in your offerings. For example, they may fill up a form for downloading a free EBook or may even contact your sales and marketing reps directly with any questions that they have in their minds. 

Hence this is the most opportune moment that your sales reps can find to speak with the prospects about their needs and create a good impression on their minds since it is your job now is to figure out what your prospects are exactly looking for and how your offerings can help them to solve their pain-points effortlessly.

Now, if you have decided to follow up directly, try to identify the answers for these following questions listed below:

• Why did the prospects come to your website?
• How did the prospects found your website?
• What the reasons that made them reach out by filling up your web-to-lead form?
• What exactly are their pain-points?

It is only by understands the answers to these questions, you can decide if your offerings and solutions are a right fit to the buyers and thereafter suggest a way you can help.

Moreover, at this point, you can also direct the prospects of your brand to other helpful resources of your company such as case studies, blog posts, videos and FAQs,

You may also request the prospect at this stage if they want to sign-up for your email list if they did not already do it when they availed your free offer.

Finally, it is most significant that you have to remain available when the prospect has any question and wants to talk to someone in your sales teams. Therefore, your sales reps need to remains available on all possible channels like phone, email and live chat and for this, you must include all your contact information in your email signature so that the prospects can find out your contact info easily.

2. The Buyer Is Evaluating Your Solution

The place for second touch point with your buyer is once the purchaser of your offerings understands how your product or service can address their pain-points, which makes your prospects advance to the mid-to-late stages in the sales funnel of your easy to use CRM software, where they are likely to start evaluating your offerings against similar options in the marketplace.

Therefore, in the stage what can you do to persuade your prospects into choosing your brand? What more information do they require in order to arrive at a decision?

Although all selling situations may differ from one another, nevertheless the key decision making factors remains the same which ultimately boil down to:

• Does your offering(s) meet your purchaser’s needs?
• Does your offering make financial sense to the buyers?
• Will buying from your brand make them more successful than purchasing from others?

To answer questions “Does your offering(s) meet your purchaser’s needs?” you can:

• Set up a product demo or a call with your buyers.
• Invite the prospect to a webinar.
• Invite them to sign up for a free trial or use a test account, since they can never know how good your solutions is unless they use it.

To provide an answer to this question “Does your offering make financial sense to the buyers?” your sales reps can put together a personalized plan that can fit the prospective buyer’s pockets, which will aid them in finding the exact cost of your proposed solution and others mentioned in the plan.

Finally, to answer the last question “Will buying from your brand make them more successful than purchasing from others?” your sales reps can easily place confidence in the prospect’s decisions to buy by:

• Sending case studies.
• Providing positive testimonials by other existing customers.
• Refer them to customers who will speak positivity on behalf of your support services and your offering(s).

Once this is done, you may need to provide your prospective customers with a little ‘prod and nudge’ in order to make them decide fast on choosing your offering by continuing to create follow-ups via email or phone.

You can also create and send limited time-bound offers at this stage as a last-ditch effort to secure your sale.

3. After the prospect has bought your solution

Congratulations! You have won the sale and now the prospective buyer has turned to a customer of your brand.

However, this does not mean that your sales process has come to an end, and you should focus on qualifying your very next prospective lead.  This is because; you must always remember that retaining your existing and more importantly the new customers should be your next step in nurturing the buyer relationship, since acquiring new customers cost 25 times more than retaining the existing ones.

Hence it is vitally important to provide maximum effort to keep your customers happy and build a long-lasting business relationship with them which you can do by:

• Thanking the buyer.
• Provide fast delivery.
• Help the buyer set up your solution.
• Send use cases.
• Reach out regularly to see if they require help.
• Make sure your sales and support reps are available easily.

Moreover, by sending surveys using MA (Marketing Automation) integrated into most best small business CRM software platform, you can also find answers to questions such as:

•    How satisfied your customers are using your offerings?
•    How satisfied your customers are with your support activities?
•    How difficult or easy they are finding your products/services to use?
•    What unforeseen issues are they experiencing with your brand?

4. Continuing the Relationship

The ultimate customer relationship touch-point in the sale cycle and the customer’s journey with your brand is continuing your relationship to move forward over time.
Remember, one of the greatest reasons for customer churn or for customers leaving your brand is because they believe that your organization does not care about them anymore.

Therefore, what can you do to keep your existing customers happy and engaged for the days to come?

Here are some additional ideas listed below that you can apply (apart from the ideas that are mentioned above):

• Create a loyalty program.
• Set up a referral program.
• Send your existing customers freebies.
• Perform up-sell or cross-sell to your existing customers on your other products/services.
  (Existing customers mostly spends an average of more than 67% than new customers, which provides excellent up-selling opportunities.)

Conclusion

Therefore, although easy to use CRM software makes the lives of sales and support reps easier, it is still equally important to consistently uphold the human-touch that customers need that can help in increasing the effectiveness of your sales process and also aid in building long-lasting and strong personal relationships. 


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