Most B2B sales reps’ sole focus is to enhance their lead generation strategies to meet sales targets and increase revenue. It may not come as a surprise that most teams fail to meet their targets as this approach is not entirely effective. Sales and marketing expertise are essential, but this may not be enough in today’s world where customers have endless options.
The challenge is that when sales representatives are preoccupied with just converting B2B sales leads; they frequently get locked in an endless prospecting cycle. They remain ignorant of their biggest asset in the sales process – existing customers.
According to reports, current customers account for a significant portion of a company’s revenue, with only 30% being generated from new customers in 2018. This clearly demonstrates that existing clients need attention if salespeople want to achieve goals.
B2B sales teams need to look beyond deal closure. They need to put focus on enhancing customer experience to grow the company. Deal closure must be viewed as the beginning of a journey to be taken with the customer – it should not just be an end of a process.
Through this article, we aim to help B2B businesses optimize and improve the sales process consistently. We will discuss customer experience, its importance and how it can be achieved.
Why Focus on Customer Success
Customer success is all about identifying the challenges faced by existing customers and offering solutions to nurture proactive partnerships with them. This boosts customer happiness, thus increasing revenue and enhancing customer loyalty. Remember, customer success cultivates favorable brand experiences, encouraging repeat business and retention.
Frequently, B2B buyers need positive experiences that enable them to get maximum value from the product/service they buy. Authentic customer experience requires a deeper understanding of the customers and the development of solid, long-lasting relationships with them. This will allow you to deliver personalized experiences throughout the buyer’s journey.
Why Customer Success Matters To the Sales Teams
Statistics indicate that most B2B organizations anticipate 77% of their revenue to come from cross-selling, renewals, and upselling to current customers. Evidence shows that effective customer success features offer greater retention rates – more than 90%.
Customer success matters a lot for sales reps; let us see how it helps them achieve their targets:
- Enhances customer loyalty – resulting in constant sales revenue
- Transforms B2B customers into promoters and advocates resulting in a more extensive customer base
- Lowers customer attrition rates
How Sales Representatives Can Leverage Customer Success to Meet Targets
Customer success benefits the sales department, and sales representatives can use this approach to achieve sales goals. At first, B2B organizations must start aligning sales and customer success teams to power sales with customer success. Sales managers must identify various alignment points, and the responsibilities of each team must be determined at every stage of the customer journey.
Let’s quickly take at some of the ways companies can boost sales through customer success:
Collaborate with marketers to map customer post-purchase lifecycle
Sales teams must partner with the marketing and customer support teams to extend the buyer’s journey map, focusing on the pre-purchase phase to cover the post-purchase phase. Mapping the post-purchase period is crucial for B2B businesses as it enables all customer-facing activities to discover realistic means of providing customers with positive experiences.
The post-purchase experience is vital to give sales revenues a boost. This experience fosters brand loyalty among customers. If B2B enterprises want to offer a positive post-purchase experience to their clients, they should adhere to the following guidelines:
- Communicate with customers: Foresee customer needs well in advance and treat them with utmost care and consideration.
- Provide convenience: This is to do with offering choice. Most customers want flexible options that suit convenience.
- Give customers control: Customers must be able to control a few aspects of the purchase process. To cite an example, B2B companies can give users the leverage to choose a preferred communication channel to connect with the service teams.
- Create brand connection: Customers who strike an emotional connection with a brand remain loyal to the brand. This can be achieved by establishing a communication channel whereby thoughtful experiences can be shared with customers.
Consider customer success a strategic operation
Customer success must not be viewed as being a cost center. Instead, sales reps must view it as a strategic engine that can help them achieve the objective of driving sales revenues. This change in mindset would mean that the sales representatives would support any investment made by a B2B company in customer support.
The advantage of customer success is that it positively influences sales volumes. An efficient customer success process is in the best interest of the sales teams. And if this department needs resources to function effectively, service teams must promote them.
Enhance customer segmentation
Customer success and sales teams can collaborate to segment customer accounts. But what do we mean by segmentation? Segmentation entails classifying clients according to distinct attributes. The basis of consumer segmentation is the data acquired by a B2B company about its customers. The more data a company has, the more divisions companies will come up with. More customer data also call for more detailed segments and, thus, more insightful. B2B companies can segment customers on factors such as company size, industry, and annual revenue among others.
While the factors mentioned above can help segment existing customers, maximum benefit can be derived by B2B companies by dividing customers based on the value offered to the company. This involves monitoring customer health using a combination of business outcomes, product consumption, and feature activation.
Buy why the need to segment customers? Customer segmentation can assist B2B sales and marketing teams in increasing sales from current customers by:
- Enabling personalized message
- Improving customer prioritization
With this, the sales and marketing teams can gauge customers’ future needs.
Support customer health scorecard development
A Customer Health Scorecard (CHS) enables B2B enterprises to monitor the connection customers share with the business. CHS allows businesses to predict unfavorable customer behavior by identifying customers that want further care before their churn rates reveal lousy health.
CHS integrates various customer account variables to enable sales and customer success teams to discover customer issues and prioritize building customer relationships. B2B sales teams can recognize consumers exhibiting unhealthy behaviors and engage them before defection.
Bottom Line
Existing customers offer B2B enterprises a steady source of income and, thus, offer tremendous value to the business. The sales teams are doing a wonderful job by bringing in new customers, but they should focus equally on retaining existing ones as well to accomplish their sales goals.
Sales teams and customer success teams must collaborate to deliver positive experiences to existing customers and convert them into brand evangelists. This will help sales reps use client referrals to enhance sales and their likelihood of fulfilling their quota.
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