customer centric strategy

How Customer Connections Drive Relationship Based Sales

How Making a Customer Connection Drives Relationship Based Sales

Lead Engagement, Lead Nurturing, Sales /

Successful businesses thrive on strong customer relationships. These connections help increase the number of sales conversions. Most importantly, the resources used to create a strong customer connection will see a strong return on investment (ROI).

Professional relationships go beyond initial contact points as good sales teams work hard to personalize the customer journey based on individual needs. By cultivating a strong relationship with clients, the likelihood of their repeated patronage increases.

As technology continues to evolve, businesses are constantly competing for attention from prospects in the digital realm. Focusing on relationship-based sales can help boost engagement with your social media, as well as direct your messaging to the correct target audience.

Keep reading, or use the following links, to learn more about how these connections drive customer relationships to a sale:

The goal of every sales team is to increase their numbers. There are many tactics out there to see higher conversions, but it is crucial to start at the beginning of the pipeline. Customer connections can happen during the first introduction to a prospect.

Making the most of interactions, even while a prospect is still in the ‘Lead’ stage, can have a huge impact on finalized sales. Before starting the process of making these connections, it is important to understand the driving idea behind this strategy.

Relationship based sales happen when a salesperson prioritizes the interactions and connections with a client to complete a sale. While price and types of services will always be a factor for customers, relationship based sales primarily focus on building customer loyalty.

Actions Needed to Move Towards Relationship-Based Selling

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Utilizing this strategy to foster relationships will help each customer feel more valued by your business. Clients will lean towards loyalty to brands when they are appreciated by the company.

B2B businesses can see a huge benefit from adopting this mindset. Since purchases of these services typically require a higher-level of commitment due to the size, customer loyalty goes a long way.

Personalized outreach is a great starting point for creating strong customer engagement strategies. Customers start their buying journey when they have a problem, so it’s important to segment your marketing for tailored audiences. Once a lead enters your pipeline, allow your salespeople to take time to nurture the prospect and gather insight into their needs.

These customer relationships have many aspects that will require personalization. The more effort your team puts into creating these lasting bonds, the higher your conversions will rise. Starting off with personal interests, encourage your salespeople to get to know their customer contacts.

By knowing their geographical location, personal hobbies, and basic profiles, it will be easier for your sales staff to find similarities to create connections. For example, an easy connecting point between sales and clients could be a similar interest in sports teams or graduation from the same alma mater. 

On the other side of things, ensure that your sales team is working hard to listen to the needs of each customer. Find out if your services or products can be tailored to provide the best solution possible. Take time to listen to customer insight before pitching specific packages.

Another crucial aspect to forming lasting customer connections is having continued contact once a sale is finalized. If your product requires training or onboarding, make sure the correct resources and enough support staff are available during this time. Be proactive in your outreach to gather feedback, and listen to any suggestions these customers may have.

Ensuring Loyalty Through Customer Experience

Once you’ve started focusing on the ways to foster strong connections, it is important to make sure these interactions are increasing customer loyalty. The key to this strategy is good customer experience throughout the buying journey.

Before implementing a customer connection strategy, you need to have an understanding of what your current clients think about your services and their experiences. According to Forbes, 80% of businesses believe they excel in customer service, but a mere 8% of customers agree with that statement.

Conducting research and opening the conversation for genuine client feedback can help your team see where improvements can happen. This information is valuable for sales strategies, and these interactions will help your customers feel valued and appreciated. Be sure to incorporate as much of their feedback as possible into your future relationship.

Looking ahead to future customer experiences, it’s important to understand how much each interaction matters in the cultivation of customer loyalty. Forbes asserts that within a day of a poor customer experience, 47% of consumers are willing to take their business to a competitor. Due to the ease of finding other options through a quick web search, there is little room for mistakes during the buying journey.

Speed and efficiency are key elements of a positive customer experience. While B2B sales cycles tend to be longer than B2C due to the nature of service, clients still value quickness. Instead of looking at ways to shorten the sales cycle itself, focus on the ways your communication can be streamlined.

Many people are conditioned to expect answers within seconds due to the availability of instant online search. While having salespeople within reach as soon as every problem occurs may not be possible, there should be resources  in place to help customers. Make sure your web forms work, check emails regularly, and don’t be afraid to hop on a call to quickly offer solutions.

Offer loyalty programs or rewards for repeat customers. 73% of customers enrolled in loyalty programs recommend that business to other buyers. By incentivizing current customers, your business will be able to attract new clients as well. 

How To Avoid a Bad Customer Journey

Conversion rates will increase when your clients feel they are on a good buying journey. There are a few ways to help avoid negative experiences during the purchasing process.

Start by focusing on the entirety of the process rather than singular pieces. Analyzing the customer journey from beginning to end will help your team pinpoint problem areas. From there, begin tracking customer behavior to identify patterns throughout your target audience.

Personalized messaging, optimized payment options, and convenient sales processes are all ways to engage modern consumers. Clients are online more than ever before, so use the data detailing their actions to your advantage.

Make sure your team is setting realistic conversion rates. Despite all of the great customer service your business provides, not every lead will result in a sale. To have an understanding of the genuine ROI from marketing and sales efforts, reasonable conversion goals are necessary.

Focus on communication while making customer connections. At the end of the day, most clients will appreciate when a business goes above and beyond to listen to their needs. Fostering strong relationships and ensuring quality customer journeys requires time, commitment, and consistent communication.

Social Media & Customer Connections

The Social Consumer Analytics

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While it is one of the newer resources in the long line of sales strategies, social media has begun to dominate the playing field. Utilizing these platforms can help accelerate your numbers, and provide valuable insights into consumer behavior.

The top platforms, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, and Youtube, will be enough to help provide your business with the tools for successful social selling. Starting off, social media will generate leads and track data for better understanding of customer behavior.

Leadboxer’s platform integrates with your team’s tech stack to access data, generate leads, and provide tools for higher conversion rates. Throughout your email and social media campaigns, Leadboxer is able to uncover data to provide contact information and behavior patterns for potential buyers.

One of the key benefits of social selling is gaining insight and learning about customers to create meaningful connections. By integrating your workflow with technology like the Leadboxer platform, your team will be able to gain a broad understanding of this data.

Generating leads through social platforms helps your salestaff find new prospects for outreach. From the very first interaction, customer connections can begin to take shape. Social media offers vital personal information to help your salespeople find similarities with their contacts.

Using social media as a way to teach about the industry and your products is another great use of the tool. By reaching your target audience with educational information, your business will be able to establish itself as a reliable leader in the industry. This allows prospects to find your product before your team even has a chance to discover them during a search process.

Engagement through social media helps to continue the professional relationship with clients. According to Hootsuite’s Digital Report 2021, 22.7% of internet users are using social media to network and handle work-related research. Continued social media outreach and marketing is crucial for maintaining strong customer connections, with many consumers using the internet to develop business relationships.

To see how social media integrations can help with customer connections, check out LeadBoxer with a free trial.

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customer centric strategy

Using CRM to Craft a Winning Customer Centric Strategy

Marketing, Sales /

Managing your customers is an important task for every successful business. Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software has become a major asset for companies, and the global market for this technology continues to rise, helping in arranging a winning customer centric strategy. CRMs help provide easy management of employee, customer, and lead interactions. This software automates sales processes, integrates seamlessly with other technology, and assists in organizing operations in individual silos.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, businesses have found themselves leaning on CRMs more than ever to manage interactions with customers. In a recently released report by Global Industry Analytics, INC (GIA), research digs deeper into the current trends and predicts continued CRM growth in the coming years.

As companies continue into the world of digital communication and increased remote work environments, knowing the best practices for CRM use can help with successful operations.

Continue reading or jump ahead to the topics below:

Increasing Popularity of CRMs During COVID-19

CRM software market

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The pandemic has reshaped the way many companies approach their business strategies. Throughout these unprecedented times, there’s been an increased emphasis on remote working environments. Managing customer relations remains an all-time priority, yet the challenges for successful outreach have grown.

With an unexpected mass shift to virtual work, there has been a need for technology conducive to interdepartmental collaboration. CRMs can help fill multiple deficiencies across workflow when departments are communicating remotely. With integrations and automation, these systems help improve productivity.

Amid the COVID-19 pandemic, the GIA study reveals that the global market for CRM software is projected to reach $81.9 billion by 2024. While CRMs may have been underutilized pre-pandemic, research demonstrates how crucial this technology is for successful remote work.

The GIA study also shows the overwhelming use of CRMs across different sizes of operations from start-ups to large corporations in the United States. CRM software in the U.S. accounts for 49.7% of the global market for this technology.

In a time when employee disconnect saw an all-time high, CRMs were able to help provide a sense of relief to businesses. Due to the rise in popularity, the usage of CRM software continues to be on an upward trend.

Workflow Management for CRMs in Remote Environments

Due to COVID, companies saw a quick switch to virtual work with little time to prepare for the transition. Since then, employees have relied on technology to stay connected with their teams. Improving workflow in remote work environments can be done through proper organization and constant company communication.

Improving operational activities within individual silos is just as important as encouraging collaboration between departments. CRM usage played a role in assisting companies to work at maximum efficiency within specific teams.

CRMs benefit employees through features like calendar and email integration, as well as notification systems. These are crucial in helping reduce the amount of missed information between employees. 

With data organized on one platform, workers are able to stay on the same page while working from different locations. Switching out of the office setting means the workflow of most departments faced disruption. 

Using CRMs means teams are able to utilize automated features to ensure proper delegation. For example, artificial intelligence (AI) can recognize and route customer emails directly to the right person without getting lost in the digital shuffle. 

Since coworkers no longer have the ability to quickly ask questions in person, built-in pipelines through CRMs can drastically improve communication.

Customer Outreach During COVID-19

In addition to causing employee engagement challenges, the pandemic also impacted customer outreach efforts. Keeping in touch with current and potential clients is vital to building out a sales pipeline. 

Due to the lack of in-person meetings and a constant stream of Zoom invitations, staying at the top of customer inboxes is an easy way to boost sales.CRMs can assist this process by sending out mass emails and setting reminders for timely follow-ups. 

CRM software allows companies to utilize templates and build-out personalized campaigns. By tracking customer engagement and storing data, CRMs also help your sales team nurture leads and re-engage stale leads.

Sales & Marketing Alignment

Successful sales campaigns are the starting line for closing a deal. To have this communication with customers, sales and marketing departments must work together. 

CRMs encourage alignment between sales and marketing teams through data collection, seamless communication systems, and software integrations. With a centralized database in your CRM, both teams can access all of a lead’s information for easy contact. 

CRM software can also help each team keep track of where a lead is within the sales pipeline. Allowing both departments access to this information helps direct marketing and sales communications to the correct clients while cutting down on duplicate outreach.

CRMs work to increase the success of your business’s lead generation and nurturing process, which ultimately improves your sales conversion rates. Utilizing a CRM can provide deeper insight into the customer journey.

Building out complete customer profiles in your CRM encourages your teams to get personal with their strategies. This allows your salespeople to understand the persona of each customer when pitching your product, while your marketing team can finetune campaigns for targeted audiences.

Customer feedback can be recorded in the system, which helps sales teams improve their sales strategies. Employees are able to track each interaction with potential customers. This information can be accessed across all departments. 

By properly using a CRM, your company can easily improve customer experience.

Customer Centric Strategy

A customer centric strategy also referred to as client-centric, means focusing your business model on creating a great customer experience to build brand loyalty. These businesses make sure that customers remain the center of their operations. The end goal is always client satisfaction.

This business approach uses the theory that going above and beyond to meet customer expectations is the best way to gain repeat sales. When utilizing the customer centric strategy, the goal is to properly maintain your existing client base to ensure long-lasting relationships.

Benefits of a Customer Centric Strategy

customer centric marketing

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Focusing your sales efforts to attract loyal customers can help your business in the long run. Simply put, new customers can be hard to find. Investing in existing relationships will help boost your sales.

Not only can it be a challenge to track down leads, but acquiring new customers is costly. Nurturing current relationships helps save your team money while selling more. The goal is to continuously provide a seamless customer experience across all of the products and services your company offers.

Using Your CRM for a Customer Centric Strategy

Improving your customer experience starts internally with your sales and marketing departments. Teams should have the proper resources to successfully meet client needs.

CRMs help streamline communication channels between teams and better your customer management practices. With easy access to contact information and the ability to track engagement with leads, staying on top of customer outreach should be a priority.

Implementing a Customer Centric Workflow

You don’t have to start from ground zero to centralize your business around customer needs. Taking advantage of your CRM and other software can help you get started with a customer centric model. There are a few key takeaways to keep in mind when using this theory:

Focus on all-hands involvement. To ensure your company is providing the best customer experience, get your teams on the same page. Emphasize interdepartmental communication. 

Make sure your employees are utilizing CRM functions for efficient workflow. Provide every team with access to customer insights so they can work to improve your client relationships.

Communicate with existing customers and gather valuable data. Understanding what your current customers like and dislike about your services provides valuable feedback for your company. Dig deep into the analytics and make sure your CRM has the most up-to-date data available for your teams.

Personalize your outreach. Automation is a huge help for mass outreach, even to your existing customers. Use your CRM to develop personalized email campaigns for segmented customer groups. 

Be sure to reach out to customers at the right time. CRMs can help keep track of when to follow up by setting reminder notifications for when it’s time for your next outreach.

Don’t be afraid of change. A customer centric strategy requires constant analysis of trends. The goal is to best predict your customer’s needs and continually provide quality solutions. As those needs evolve, make sure you are adapting to serve your base.

Automating and Integrating Your Technology

Devoting more time to an improved customer experience is easy when you have the ability to automate parts of the process. Integrating your CRM and other technology helps improve workflow and frees up time for customer outreach. 

Rather than having multiple tools to get the job done, merging your technology will create efficiency within your workflow. When combined with a CRM like Hubspot or Pipedrive, Leadboxer works with your existing stack to help push data where it needs to go. 

When using Leadboxer, your sales and marketing teams can easily access contact information, use tools for email tracking, and manage your customer relationships from multiple platforms.
Get firsthand experience with CRM integration capabilities by checking out a free LeadBoxer trial.

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