The last decade has seen tremendous advances in how companies market to and transact with customers in an increasingly digital world. However, other than advances in CRM and marketing automation, not much has changed in how sales people learn about and interact with prospects. The time is right for the next stage of sales innovation, driven by communities.

Here’s the trend: Companies that prioritize their relationships with customers have long leveraged communities to deliver better customer experiences across marketing, support, and product teams. But customer communities can do more than generate authentic word of mouth marketing, offer 24/7 support, and serve as engines for product innovation.

Customer communities can also be a rich source of targeted sales leads that provide deep insight into buyer behavior based on what questions and interests they have and where they are in the buying cycle.

Here are five primary ways that customer community makes selling easier and more effective:

Attract customers with great content 

Community is a great lead generator because of the search-optimized content your customers naturally post. The reason is simple. Many buyers start their purchase evaluation process with a Google search. If you have specific content about your products and services in your customer community, your prospects will be able to easily discover your brand because related content will rank in top search results. Better yet, they’ll be exposed to customer-generated content, which is viewed as more trustworthy than traditional marketing content. 

Know more about your prospects

In the past, sales teams worked from massive lists of essentially unknown prospects. With today’s marketing automation systems, sales team get more insight into what prospects are interested in based on what content those prospects have viewed or downloaded. Customer community takes it one step further. If a prospect asks a question in the community or responds to another customer’s post, you know who they are, what interests they have, and what they’re in the market for.  In fact, you have an opportunity to engage with them before they even enter into a sales process. 

Set triggers so you’re not selling blindly

Without knowing who the prospects are and whether or not they know your product or service, it’s hard to sell to them. A customer community provides a great way to set triggers for buying intent. For example, one of our customers in the highly competitive wireless networking space structured their community so that whenever a competitor’s product is mentioned in a community post, the sales team is alerted to the conversation. These alerts give their sales team invaluable intelligence around how best to convert that mention into a sale as well as insight into how their products fare relative to their competitors in the eyes of their prospective customers.

Craft better selling messages for your installed base

Your product marketing team will provide your sales team with the “official” selling messages. But there is no way that they can imagine every sales scenario. On the other hand, the community will give you real-time insight into what your current customers are most interested in. At Get Satisfaction, we encourage our customer success teams to look at community conversations with the sales team before customers come up for renewal. There is a wealth of information and insight you can use to create up- and cross-selling opportunities. 

Help sales people learn from each other

Finally, communities provide a great resource for sales people to interact and learn from each other.  Take Telstra for example — the biggest Telecom in Australia with hundreds of stores selling everything from wireless and mobile services to pay TV. Prior to implementing their customer community to operationalize the sharing of best practices between stores, performance of individual teams was unpredictable. With the collaborative conversations taking place in the sales community, the messaging, positioning, packaging, and selling best practices have all improved.

The art of selling is really just the art of building relationships. In an increasingly digital world, this requires listening to the needs of your customers, as well as your prospects. There is no better way to operationalize this than through a customer community.  If prospects are engaging in conversations about particular products or services within the community, it’s likely that they are already interested in those products or services. 

Learn more about community management with the free e-book below.