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How to modernize the customer experience with Sales Enablement?
The customer experience plays a key role in sales effectiveness, and is all the more decisive given that the time spent by the buyer with the sales person is becoming increasingly short. It even amounts to 5% of the buyer's total buying time (Gartner), if we take into account the multiple decision-makers involved! In this context, a sales experience that leaves a lasting impression will help you get your message across more effectively, differentiate you from your competitors and therefore improve your sales performance. Sales performance must be at the heart of your Sales Enablement strategy. Here's an article on the customer appointment, the appointment experience and the new expectations of B2B buyers.
What is the customer experience?
The customer experience encompasses all the interactions between a brand and a buyer throughout the purchasing process. In our case, the interactions take place between the sales rep and the buyer, before, during and after the appointment. Each interaction, however small, influences the buyer's perception of the brand and can have an impact on his or her level of satisfaction, which in turn can influence the outcome of a sale.
What are the benefits of a successful customer experience?
Benefits for the company
- Reinforce your brand image: a brand's image depends not only on the product/service sold, but also on the buyer's overall level of satisfaction. Let's take the case of the appointment: is the salesperson's approach personalized? Is the presentation fluid and interactive? Does the salesperson provide precise answers to the buyer's questions? Is the buyer in a position to make informed decisions following the meeting? All these elements tend to enhance the buyer's live experience, which in turn improves their satisfaction and helps convey a positive image of the company.
- Better understanding buyers: to deliver a successful customer experience, it's essential to understand the buyer's needs and behavior. The Sales Enablement application helps to professionalize this process by tracing the content presented by sales reps during appointments. In this way, the marketing team can gain valuable information about the buyer (Which content performs best? Is the buyer more interested in offer A or B?...), enabling them to continually improve the experience they offer.
- Differentiate yourself from the competition: a good customer experience makes a lasting impression and sets you apart from the competition. When it's interactive and engaging, as the Sales Enablement application enables, it positively influences the buyer's decision, giving the company a strategic advantage in its market.
- Increase company sales: the customer experience is a criterion that weighs heavily in the buyer's purchasing decision. When successful, it has a significant impact on company sales. As Bain & Company's study underlines: companies that offer a better customer experience achieve revenues between 4% and 8% higher than their market.
Benefits for the buyer
- Ease of purchase: a good customer experience offers buyers greater convenience in their purchasing decision. In fact, if the appointment experience goes as planned for the buyer (right content at the right time, convincing presentation, product meeting needs, questions pertinently answered, engaging exchange between interlocutors...), the latter will be more inclined to choose this solution rather than another. Indeed, if all the conditions for purchase are met, why go elsewhere? This saves them time and energy.
- Increased trust: companies focused on customer experience tend to personalize their interactions, offering buyers products/services tailored to their needs. Providing a personalized customer experience helps to improve buyers' trust in the brand. As Genesys underlines: 80% of buyers say that companies earn their trust and their money when they offer personalized experiences (Genesys). A confident buyer is naturally encouraged to turn to the solution on offer.
- Personal satisfaction: when the appointment experience lives up to the buyer's expectations, he or she is satisfied. This satisfaction is linked to the buyer's personal decisions (having selected the right service provider and realizing that it's a match made in appointment...), the way the appointment turned out (the sales rep's performance, engaging and interactive presentation...) but also the "wow" effect provided by the Sales Enablement application during the presentation.
Modernize the customer's appointment experience
Ultra-connected, more autonomous, better informed and more demanding, the buyer has evolved over the last few years, and his or her needs at the time of an appointment are more precise. The customer experience and personalization are more than ever at the heart of this change, as evidenced by the Global B2B Payments Playbook (85% of B2B buyers place as much importance on the buying experience as on products) and La Poste Solution (the lack of personalization according to buyer needs is an impediment to purchasing). How can Sales Enablement meet these new needs?
The Sales Enablement application is built around the appointment itself, so that it can be approached from different angles. In this way, the right document can be accessed from a number of different angles, in a given context. A number of advanced search functions can also be used to identify specific content using cross-referenced criteria. Beyond the contextualized path, your Sales Enablement application needs to interconnect your content. The aim is to extend the reach of initial content with other content. In this way, you can provide teams with synthetic, easy-to-handle content, then supplement the information contained in the content with other, complementary content. A product data sheet, for example, can be enhanced with precise technical data sheets, promotional or assembly videos and visuals. With a simple click, your sales reps can provide buyers with precise, contextualized information without systematically weighing down all the other appointments that don't require this information. Your content activated in this way is much more effective, and buyers' perception of it is greatly enhanced.
Storytelling is another element that contributes to the success of a sales experience. Knowing how to tell a story sells and is in itself an excellent way of creating a bond with the buyer. By visually presenting a brand's story, illustrating a service support process, a product construction process or even its end-to-end delivery, you create an active listening experience that reinforces the buyer's understanding of your products/services, your mission and your commitments... The variety of embedded content (image, video, 3D realization...) in the Sales Enablement application reinforces the salesperson's narrative, offering the buyer an interactive and immersive sales experience. In this way, the salesperson can create a bond, engage and hold the buyer's attention, reinforcing his or her ability to convey the key message that can really influence the course of a sale.
Several features of your Sales Enablement application are designed to increase sales performance in appointments. These include "on-the-fly" qualification of information from your CRM, and offer or contract generation. These functions must be at the heart of your transformation, and may require specific support for your sales reps staff as they get to grips with them during appointments.
Offer a personalized customer experience with Sales Enablement
Although the two concepts may seem similar and sometimes confused, modernizing and personalizing have two distinct purposes. The modernization of your customer approach is based on the flexibility and quality of the appointment information. It is precisely this part that also corresponds to a form of personalization of the speech and the displayed content. The personalization of the sales approach also covers the upstream, the generation of personalized content and the post appointment.
Personalizing the sales approach means improving the way sales reps prepare appointments. This improvement does not have to be time-consuming, but it does have to improve the quality of the proposed support materials. This enhanced preparation relies on the production of personalized content, access to up-to-date information and available training aids to better master the sales pitch. Personalizing the sales approach during a meeting means being able to take account of the unexpected and integrate it into what has already been prepared. During the appointment, access to validated information from your CRM enables contextualized sharing and updating with the customer. Finally, after the appointment, the tracking of shared elements enables you to intelligently adapt your sales reminders for greater efficiency.
The design of your application plays a key role in the customer experience. That's why the co-construction between your marketing and sales teams, and the participation of Salesapps, ensures the best possible first draft. The scalability of the platform will enable you to regularly improve its structure by learning from what works and what doesn't work so well.
How to measure customer experience with Sales Enablement?
The personalization and improvement of the customer experience must be based on a precise analysis of the KPIs used to measure their performance. Using a Sales Enablement application gives you access to all the data on the progress of sales reps. This data is extremely valuable for optimizing sales paths, adjusting the content available to sales reps, training them and arbitrating your marketing investments. The data generated by your meetings is active, enabling you to continually improve the material made available to your sales reps.
Interconnected with your CRM, information from your appointments can also be automatically fed into your accounts, contacts, opportunities and more. Your sales reps saves precious time, and the information captured is precise and verbose: paths taken during appointments, content shared, information displayed, etc. In 2022, 77% of companies consider that their CRM data is of poor or very poor quality. By connecting your CRM to Salesapps, visit reports are automated, enabling sales reps to spend less time on this administrative task, and ensuring that your entire organization has access to quality data in the CRM. The reliability of the data collected is essential if you want to target your customers accurately and improve your sales performance. Salesapps takes the customer experience even further! For example, it notifies users as soon as content is read or downloaded, enabling them to be much more agile in their follow-ups.
Digitizing sales activity impacts several levels of the customer relationship, and enables sales and marketing teams to drive continuous improvement. While modernization and personalization of the appointment are key to performance, only data and its analysis will enable you to achieve perfect control and continuous improvement.
What makes for a successful customer experience?
A successful customer experience requires a change in corporate culture, from "product centric" to "customer centric". The salesperson must not impose his or her product and sales pitch, but take a genuine interest in the buyer and his or her needs. A good sales experience is personalized, both in terms of presentation (the right content at the right time, textual and visual elements, etc.) and in terms of the exchange and answers provided by the salesperson. The salesperson must take on the role of "meaning-maker" to simplify understanding and identification of the right information, enabling the buyer to make informed decisions. It's worth mentioning that trust in the buyer/salesperson relationship plays a key role in the success of the appointment, and that engaging the buyer through fun, interactive content helps to make the customer experience more lively and easily memorable, thus scoring points in appointments and differentiating the sales approach from your competitors.
FAQ
What is the customer experience?
The customer experience represents all the interactions between a company and a buyer. These interactions can be tangible (marketing content, email, sales presentation, etc.) or intangible (sales pitch during an appointment, telephone follow-up, etc.), and they all have one thing in common: they evoke an emotion in the buyer, influencing thepurchasing experience in a positive or negative way.
How can we improve the customer experience?
To improve the customer experience, there's no secret! You have to measure, analyze and then implement new practices, not only to maintain a continuous improvement approach, but also to best satisfy the buyer's needs. That's how you can create a memorable brand experience for the buyer.
How does the Sales Enablement application improve the customer experience?
The Sales Enablement application modernizes and personalizes the sales approach to appointments, making it a perfect tool for improving the experience conveyed before, during and after the appointment.
How do you create a customer experience?
Creating a customer experience means first and foremost offering a product that meets customers' expectations, then ensuring that the value proposition is perceived as qualitative (need satisfied, product use smooth, effective resolution of problems encountered by the user...) and that the experience is memorable (wow effect, go the extra mile for the buyer...). Customer satisfaction is an excellent indicator of the performance of thebuying experience.
To learn more about the B2B customer experience, and how to improve it and put it into practice, we recommend the Salesforce article.
