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Your sales team doesn’t only consist of business development representatives and account executives. Your designer, your customer support rep, and even your engineer all play a role in closing a deal.
Everyone at your company is in sales.
A sales cycle begins long before a sales representative has their first customer call. In fact, studies from SiriusDecisions show that buyers complete 67% of their customer journey online.
A prospect may view your pricing page, register for a webinar, sign up for a two-week trial, click a Facebook Ad, or download a white paper.
All of these interactions occur outside of a typical sales funnel, but they play an important role in the process. It’s crucial to have a clear picture of the entire customer journey if you want to close more deals.
Our VP of Sales says that closing a deal is the last chapter in a book. Characters are introduced and developed, plot lines thicken, and then an a-ha moment occurs when the book hits its climax. Like compelling stories, a complete sales cycle includes every interaction a prospect has had with your company — from their first time landing on your blog to the day they sign a contract with you.
Too often, organizations today are only looking at fields within their CRM window to understand the lifecycle of a deal. Incorporating every interaction a prospect has with your company will help you find more qualified leads, shorten sales cycles, and close bigger deals – like having all the chapters of a book instead of just the last one.
Marketing, Customer Success, Product, and Design are all teams that create assets or experiences your prospects interact with.
Did your prospect sign up for gated content that marketing team created?
Did your prospect register for a demo to learn about the product?
Did he or she ask questions during the trial phase that your support team answered?
Did your the convert to a paying customer on a lower tier at the completion of 14 days?
If the answer is yes to any of the questions above, then you can make two assumptions:
Your customer performed due diligence in evaluating your product or services.
You can start learning from customer interactions across your company to shorten your sales cycle.
You already analyze Salesforce data: your accounts, campaigns, leads, and opportunities. You can go further than that, though, by adding in data like which customers have viewed your pricing page, never completed their trial registration form, or browsed your product line. With this analysis, you can identify the best content to send prospects, the best industries, titles and companies to target, and the best features to push.
It feels amazing to mark an opportunity as Closed Won in Salesforce, but what if you could close even more deals by better understanding the whole customer storyline?
By bringing together your company’s data across every customer touch point — product, support, and marketing in addition to sales — you’ll get new insights into where you fit in the story and how to optimize your chances for happily ever after.
If you want to learn more about how Segment can help you put your data to work, click here to get started.
Always be closing.
Liz Yee is a Partner Manager at Segment, a company focused on the customer data platform. Liz works with customer data companies (CRM, email, helpdesks, payments, etc) to help them succeed on the Segment platform. Before Segment, she was a Predictive Analytics Specialist at IBM.
