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If you’re in sales, you don’t need us to tell you that buyers’ expectations have changed – those demands are something you experience every day. It’s no wonder that almost 66% of sales people want to improve the way their organisation captures new business, including better ways to upsell and cross-sell.

Most sales teams face three big obstacles:

  1. Business pressures often mean sales have to get through as many leads as possible – so they default back to a transactional, one-size-fits-all approach.
  2. It’s hard to build meaningful connections with new prospects while satisfying your existing accounts. One of them always suffers.
  3. Making a seamless buying experience takes more than just sales. You need close co-operation with marketing, finance and others (who all have their own stuff to deal with!).

Sound familiar? Don’t despair. There are some constructive things you can do – and our free guide Win and Grow Customers: Your Guide to Delivering Better Sales Experiences unpacks them in detail.

Here’s a sneak preview of the four key steps to help you evolve your sales process…

 

Step 1: Win new business with a better buying experience

The closer your sales team can get to your buyer, the more successful you’ll be. To make that transition from just another approved vendor to trusted advisor, you need to start building trust from the start – by meeting the customer wherever they are in the buying process. 

And you can create that better first impression by using your unified customer data to see what they’re interested in to tailor your content – and your conversation.

Some other tips from the guide: 

  • Use automation to help sales follow up on marketing leads at exactly the right moment.
  • Combine sales and marketing data so sales conversations are always fully informed.
  • Avoid losing business through delays and errors in quoting, by streamlining the quoting process.

Step 2: Empower partners to become trusted advisers

Your customer’s experience is no less important if you sell through channel partners. To the buyer, your partner is the face of your brand. With that in mind, it’s just as vital that you equip your partners to deliver the experience your buyers demand. 

That means treating your partners and investing in them as if they were part of your own team. In a market where 75% of commerce happens through partners, it’s potentially a big differentiator for you, too.

Partner-enablement tips in the guide include:

  • Step away from geographic territories, and use AI to route leads to the partner who’s best placed to win each deal.

  • Give partners a two-way window into your CRM, so you each get the best view of the buyer’s needs.

  • Automate as much of the quoting process as you can, so partners can respond quickly and consistently.

Step 3: Nurture relationships to retain and renew customers

Usually, keeping an existing customer is more cost-efficient than winning a new one. Reducing your customer churn won’t happen overnight – you need dedicated time and investment.

Tips for growing existing customer relationships include:

  • Use AI to alert your salespeople when something important has changed with an existing customer.
  • Use automated communications to re-engage customers before their renewal date.
  • Work across departments to build a unified renewal process that’s as simple as sticking with your Netflix plan.

Step 4: Expand customer relationships through cross-sell and upsell

Our research shows 89% of buyers are more loyal to companies they already trust. Once you’ve established a trusting relationship with your customer, you’re in the ideal position to take that further and find new ways to solve their business problems.

Upselling and cross-selling tips from in the guide:

  • Collaborate on a really effective joint account plan with your internal specialists and your wider sales team.
  • Connect all your customer data to give you the most holistic view of their goals and pain points.
  • Use pre-set logic in your quote process, to let salespeople know when there’s a higher-end alternative that still fits the customer’s budget.

Your customer wants a one-to-one relationship. Now it’s up to you.

In the new era of selling, creating a connected personalised buying experience makes life easier not only for your customer, but also more enjoyable for your salespeople. The “secret sauce” is technology - the right technology that can do the hard work and free up your people to do what they do best: making the real human connections that will always drive business.

Explore the four steps in Win and Grow Customers: Your Guide to Delivering Better Sales Experiences. Or, if you’d like to talk about your challenges in more detail, get in touch.