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Customer experience is a popular term and goal for many sales organizations this year. But it’s tricky. Unlike most sales metrics, customer experience is very difficult to measure and even more tenuous to determine where you should spend time to improve it.
There is, however, a simple question you can ask and hopefully answer. Would you buy from your organization given your current sales processes and practices? There is also a fun and interesting way to test it. Become a mystery shopper for your own organization. Create a fake name / persona and start the process. There is a lot you can learn.
The first step in this process might be the most valuable. Become your customer. Think about all of the details. What company do they work for? What role do they play? What problems are they likely to be thinking about? You might discover you don’t know your target customer as well as you think you do. Regardless, make some assumptions and then jump in. Now remember we are testing your sales process and not your marketing process. You don’t need to be doing web searches to evaluate your company’s SEO competition and ranking. Assume you are a warm prospect and you want to find out the next level of information about your product and perhaps make a buying decision if you have more of a transactional product.
Sometimes a good place to start, even though it may involve some of your marketing processes, is to download some of your company’s content. Find a compelling piece of content (eBook, whitepaper, etc) that looks like it might be useful to your persona and download it. What happens next? How long does it take the sales team to contact you? How many pieces of content is required before they do? Some basics still apply here. The faster your sales team follows up with a lead the more likely the lead will convert. Even better if you can catch the lead while they are actually viewing the material you sent.
This one can be tricky if you have a small team as they might be able to recognize your voice. With larger teams this will not be a problem. Be creative though and enlist a friend if you have to. This conversation is the start of the sales process and can share some of the most enlightening information from a customer experience perspective. How did they reach out - phone, email, both? Consider not answering the first time they reach out to hear the voicemail they leave or see their follow up process. And perhaps, ignore them when they reach out again.
Once you do connect — how did the conversation go? Was the seller more interested in pushing the product and features or understanding your perspective and challenges? How many open-ended questions did they ask? Did you do most of the talking? Go ahead and ask some tough questions. Mention a competitor and see what happens. This is a trust building moment. How you talk about the competition reveals a lot about your company. Did the seller talk about them respectfully but focus on the things that they think would really make a difference for you? Through all of this, the goal for the seller is to be consultative in their approach. This interaction pattern is perhaps one of the most critical in terms of establishing a potential customer’s opinion of your company. It’s the people-to-people interactions that trump tweets, fancy web sites and nice content marketing.
A great customer experience puts the customer front and center in all aspects of the sales process. It reinforces to the prospect that this is a company they want to do business with. Did they build up trust and credibility quickly? If you were really this buyer, how comfortable would you feel continuing the business relationship?
If you weren’t convinced through this sales process that you should move forward and purchase, then there is a lot of work ahead to put a strong strategy in place. If you were convinced to purchase, think back to your engagements with the seller and find places to improve. There is always room for improvement and training.
Once you’ve completed this research, you need to share your findings with the team. Now is a good time to tell them about this undercover work you’ve done. This conversation should be constructive, outlining the positives and the negatives in the current sales process. Start with the elements of the sales process that worked well. Then, go over the areas that weren’t convincing enough and brainstorm ways to make them better. Don’t forget to give praise where praise is due. It’s useful to focus on solving the bad experiences, but it’s also beneficial to share the positive aspects of your mystery shopping experience.
Conrad Bayer is the Chief Executive Officer of Tellwise a Sales Acceleration technology that empowers sellers and buyers to collaborate in real-time across any device and platform. Tellwise Smart Messages enable sellers to close business faster by revealing buyer behavior, improving communication workflow and delivering a simple real-time collaboration experience.
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