Acquiring a new customer costs 5 to 25 times more than retaining an existing one, according to a Harvard Business Review study. This underlines the crucial importance ofoptimizing the customer experience to not only retain, but also increase customer loyalty.
In fact, a 5% increase in customer loyalty can boost profits by 25% to 95%. This fact highlights the need tooptimize the customer experience and retain customers, in order to sustain business and increase profitability.
In B2B, the quest for the customer experience is above all aimed at building long-term customer loyalty in order to guarantee recurring revenues and reduce the annual acquisition effort.
This customer experience is defined by the creation of a unique moment of exchange between your sales force and the customer.
Et the creation of this moment begins long before the meeting between customer and salesperson. It is imagined and designed by the marketing teams, who work on drafting appropriate language elements and communication media, before being presented by your sales forces in the field.
This initial preparation is crucial to establishing a solid foundation that can then be enriched and personalized by your sales forces. That's why it's essential to align marketing efforts with those of field sales. Through training and the use of the right digital tools, they'll be able to relay the right messages.
Purchasing decisions are often influenced by emotional factors, such as trust, satisfaction and a sense of personal connection. So by placing emotion at the heart of your sales process, you'll create a unique buying moment, increase the chances of a sale and build customer loyalty.
Offering an exceptional customer experience can become your greatest advantage, and enable you to better position your products on the shelves. In supermarkets, everything hinges on the relationship your brand maintains with its brands and stores. Let's discover together 7 basic principles for offering a good experience and developing a lasting customer relationship.
The customer experience is multi-channel and begins with the first interaction. The first impression is crucial in the customer journey. According to a Salesforce study, 75% of customers expect a consistent experience, whatever channel they use. It is therefore vital to preserve this continuity during subsequent exchanges, and to ensure that no information is lost from the customer's journey through the purchasing process.
A salesperson's priority is to understand his or her customer's expectations, in order to offer personalized support. But very often, customers don't know exactly what they want, for three main reasons:
If the salesperson does not give himself the means to identify the customer's expectations through a series of personalized and coherent questions, the customer will lead the interview and focus on what he wants to know with a strong cognitive bias.
His topics will revolve around price, service and quality of the solution.
The sales person will be blocked by his lack of qualification and will be forced to develop a value proposition, a list of arguments, and answers to the buyer's standard questions.
Standard questions = Standard answers = Standard customer experience
That's why it's vital to set up an effective sales and qualification process, and learn to ask the right questions. It helps toidentify the customer's expectations, without prefabricated questions.
The expectations of the prospect/customer are increasingly high since they have access to information. Thus, it is considered that 57% of the buying process of B2B buyers is done before making contact with the seller. This transformation in the purchasing process must force the salesperson to give the answer as close as possible to the customer's expectations, which already represents a major challenge for sales departments.
By trying to go beyond the buyer's expectations, the salesperson proposes elements that are not appropriate for his client who believes he is differentiating himself. The message is blurred and the buyer no longer perceives the concordance of his objective with your product/service.
Thus, the salesperson will devalue the customer experience in favour of a sale and become too commercial and not enough of an advisor.
That's why you need to train your sales people to listen. By guiding the interview, while letting the customer express himself, they will better understand his expectations and objectives. Don't forget that customers are often the same. Within an industry, they generally want to meet the same objectives and challenges. So take your experience, your successes and failures, and turn this knowledge into an ideal customer experience.
It is essential that the salesperson adapts his questions and answers to the customer's structural problems and that he does not have an overly simplistic approach to the customer's complexity. Thus, through a series of questions, the salesperson must understand the decision-making process of his customer and the complexity of this decision. This purchase is linked to other issues unknown to the salesperson.
This approach makes it possible to build a personalised sales plan with the customer that corresponds to his expectations and that will therefore be more difficult to refuse and will significantly increase the buying experience.
It's a misconception that a good customer experience consists of saying "yes" to your customer over and over again ("" Start with no "Jim Camp)
Successful customer interaction doesn't always mean agreeing with the customer. Sometimes it's necessary to challenge the customer's ideas. But be careful, you have to confront your customer's ideas, but with finesse and intelligence, i.e. by asking questions.
Your client wants to build a relationship with an intelligent person who understands his problems and has the ability to take him to a different level of thinking.
To advise your customers in the best possible way, it's essential to draw on both your internal data and external data (IRI, Nielsen...). The combination of these data - if properly analyzed - will enable you to identify market trends. Let's take a concrete example: suppose you've launched a successful promotional campaign in a specific supermarket. Your area managers can then suggest the same operation to other stores in your network with similar characteristics (size, stratum, type of customer), based on evidence. The aim is to develop a proactive sales approach, proposing solutions even before any problems emerge. This strategy positions your sales force and your brand as expert references in their field, reinforcing their credibility and added value with customers.
Buyers feel that salespeople are not good enough at listening and are too focused on their sales. That's why the first quality of an over-performing salesperson is his or her ability to listen.
Listening doesn't mean letting the customer talk, following the thread of the conversation with varying degrees of interest. It's about engaging the customer, paying attention to what he says, asking questions, taking an interest in the issues he faces, his organization, his strategy, his own customers and other suppliers.
Understanding the customer by listening and personalizing the customer experience are at the heart of loyalty.
According to the Ebbinghaus curve, 80% of the information is forgotten after a week. How many field salespeople only report at the end of the week, thus losing the precious sesame acquired. The appointment report must be made as soon as possible. It will consolidate active listening and allow them to better communicate with their prospect the next time.
In addition to appropriate training, the provision of a mobile CRM is a particularly effective way of helping field sales staff drastically improve the customer experience, thanks to permanent access to the history of exchanges and information shared with a customer.
