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Personal shoppers will teach you how to dress well by dragging you from shop to shop until you learn. Tailors will make the most stylish and best fitting clothes of your life if you meet them in person. And for the big decisions in life - from mortgages to life insurance and more - there’s nothing really like being able to sit down with someone and go through the many options available to you.
For a lot of purchases, having a personal connection with the seller is as important as the product itself. The internet sucks at all of this. It’s true! It’s bad at emulating the human touch that talented salespeople are known for. The solutions for building connections are clunky, klugey, or otherwise inelegant, and they leave so much of the subtlety of person-to-person interactions completely absent.
Without further ado, here's what you need to watch out for, lest you stick your customers in a painful place:
Keeping the trip down the sales pipeline as short as possible is a huge technical challenge. It's especially hard if you are, for example, selling life insurance, which has a really complicated and long form that all applicants need to get through. The longer a transaction, the less likely it is that you’ll close the deal at all. People get busy, or they find better options, or they just forget to get back to you. At some point, you’ll wish you could just sit down and figure everything out in ten minutes, and that’s hard if the person is across the country (or the world).
Unfortunately, it’s not enough to just reply immediately. If your communication isn’t backed up by action, you’re only as good as an algorithm. Don’t get me wrong, I love algorithms. I love how good Amazon is at suggesting which books I might read next. I love how great Google is at — well, pretty much everything. But when I want something complicated done, I trust a person to do it right and make sure it’s executed to spec. Until we have an army of HAL 9000s to help us in our day-to-day lives, we’ll rely on real people to be most helpful.
Even the most basic sales pitch is a highly interactive experience. Both people learn, respond, and adapt to new information as it comes. From bartering in a Turkish market to selling financial products, it’s all about the interactivity.
This means that the closer you are to your customer, the easier it is to come to a mutually agreeable solution. When you’re literally right in front of them, it’s a lot easier to break down the barriers to that solution. The feedback loop between customer and salesperson keeps things exciting. But when your customer is nothing more than a statistic, or if she has to take the initiative to get in touch with your team, it's not the same. The internet, as good as it is for connecting us, can end up becoming a barrier to truly interactive communication.
Behind all of this is the idea that your customer deserves and expects more than a rote form or a mass e-mail. It’s the idea that your ability to empathize and connect with a real human being is going to be valuable, no matter how good a computer can get at selling things.
Make sure you exercise those empathy muscles. It’s not rocket science, nor data science, nor any other kind of science — it’s just learning to identify with the person you’re talking with. That’s a more lucrative proposition than treating your customers as numbers.
Now that you know these pitfalls of technology, you're probably thinking up a few ways that your own online experiences have fallen short of excellence. It's not necessary that companies make bad customer experiences — just think of how many awards Zappos wins every year. They win a lot of awards. A lot. And it's not because they have been implanted with customer empathy chips. They just meet the needs of the people they choose to serve, and they do it consistently.
So you want a CRM, but don't know which one is right for you. We can help! Visit salesforce.com or download the free e-book.
