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Building a customer base has always been a big test for startups and small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs). This has become an even greater challenge over the past two years.
What’s changed? Customers now expect more from businesses than they did before.
They desire a richer experience when they are shopping online or have a question. They also want to access personalised services at any time, and are much more likely to deal with companies that meet their needs.
Keeping up with changing customer expectations affects the vast majority of modern businesses. In fact, 72% of participants in this year’s global State of Marketing report said that meeting customer expectations has become harder over the past year. The same survey found that the greatest challenge businesses faced in 2021 was delivering real-time customer engagement.
There are similar insights in Salesforce’s latest Small and Medium Business Trends Report, in which SMBs highlighted the key challenges they are facing:
Personalising customer engagements
Providing a connected experience
Responding to enquiries quickly
This shift means businesses need to think afresh about how to find, win, and keep customers.
Instead of traditional advertising and marketing, many find that improving how they collect and analyse customer data delivers the best results.
Already, 85% of small businesses use data to drive their customer engagement, according to the State of Marketing survey. Just 38% of respondents are satisfied with the completeness of their customer data.
The good news is that there are tech tools that can help SMBs collect better data and use it more effectively. Consider using these tools to identify, attract, and retain new customers in 2022 and beyond:
For most SMBs, finding customers is one of many competing priorities. If you’re focused on developing a product or service that people will love, there’s often not much time left for identifying leads.
That’s when solutions such as Pardot and Marketing Cloud can be very useful. They help SMBs create meaningful connections with customers, capture high quality leads, and achieve more conversions. Already, 2.8 million SMBs rely on Pardot to help them find customers.
There are several ways that Pardot and Marketing Cloud can help you find more customers:
With Pardot and Marketing Cloud, you can quickly build personalised, data-driven email campaigns. You can reach customers on their preferred channels, which should speed up your return on investment.
Pardot also generates insightful ROI reporting, so you can understand which elements of your strategies are working.
These features deliver real results. With Pardot, customers have seen sales revenue increase by 34% and marketing effectiveness increase by 37% on average.
As customers seek businesses that truly ‘know’ them, SMBs respond by accelerating their investment in sales tech. Fifty-three percent of growing businesses surveyed in the SMB Trends Report said they have already done this.
Many of those businesses are adopting Sales Cloud, one of the modules that runs on the Salesforce platform. Sales Cloud provides companies with the tools needed to modernise how they sell and how customers buy in a digital-first, work-from-anywhere world.
Some of the most powerful features are:
Sales Cloud powers every aspect of your sales process with a 360-degree view of the customer. With all your customer data in one place, your sales team can contribute to each sale. No more spreadsheets, searching through emails, or looking for a sticky note. You can also take advantage of AI-powered sales tools to automate day-to-day processes. This frees up your sales team to concentrate on winning more deals.
Like other Salesforce products, Sales Cloud has an intuitive interface that makes winning a customer a hassle-free process. It also features real-time dashboards to empower and accelerate your decision making.
For many SMBs, retaining customers after the first sale is perhaps the most challenging aspect of growing a customer base.
As customers become more selective, it’s far from certain that one sale will lead to another. In fact, more than half of all SMBs around the world have now invested in customer service software, according to the SMB Trends Report.
The data speaks for itself. Ninety-one percent of customers agree that a positive customer service experience makes them more likely to make another purchase. More than 70% of customers say that they have made a purchase decision based on the quality of the customer service. Fifty-eight percent have said that their customer service expectations have risen over the past two years.
Salesforce’s Service Cloud solution is the ideal choice for businesses hoping to establish and maintain high levels of personalised customer service. It allows SMBs to:
Service Cloud also makes it easy to set up self-service options for your customers. That way, customers can easily access knowledge articles, information about their accounts, and community support 24/7.
The past two years have tested customer-focused businesses around the world. 2022 seems likely to be another challenging year.
The SMBs that successfully build their customer bases will be the ones that deliver excellent customer experiences.
As you move forward, let Salesforce be your trusted partner. Salesforce has the solutions you need to find, win, and keep new customers.
