Here's the best of Auckland Grow 2018.
Customers are less-willing to visit a retail store, call, or hold the line to get the information they need. They want answers now and businesses need to support this with self-serve options (or a customer will go somewhere else). You'll have felt these changes reverberate down phone-lines, customer service desks, on social media and amongst sales teams.
So it makes sense that 'they who respond first, win'
Delivering on this need needn't be by adding head-count to the customer service team. Customers want to find their answers online where they can get to when they want, where they want (outside of Monday - Friday, 9am - 5pm), and they don't want to have to wait on the other end of a phone line.
Businesses should actively be looking to review, and cluster high-volume queries to identify trends.
In addition, look for process improvements that can support social media and person-to-person communication;
This means businesses have to drive recommendations and reviews out of their inboxes where positive feedback can hide, and above the line for everyone to see.
Salespeople and marketers sit just above politicians and car salespeople in the trust index. What we're saying doesn't carry the same weight as it used to (and nor do the promises of glossy sales brochures).
Before the internet, and the democratisation of information, customers would end up defaulting to purchase from those with the biggest budget. Where TV and radio channels used to dominate source of referral reports for big business, we're seeing a huge change. Word-of-mouth is becoming the single best source of leads.
Businesses need to drive recommendations and referrals above the line, so they can be seen, weighed, and added to the consideration of new customers:
1 Think about what channels your potential customers are on, where they spend time online, and focus reviews /referrals on these channels.
2 Consider when to ask for recommendations based on your customer's lifecycle journey. Identify key points where satisfaction levels are high, when outputs have been delivered.
3 It's fine to ask twice for a review. But don't keep asking if a review isn't forth-coming. Come back later, in line with a further positive outcome/deliverable or purchase.
4 You don't need to incentivise customers to do this: if people love your product they’re going to rave about it.
Businesses have to put customers at the ♥ of their decision-making and process-design to deliver to these needs.
Rather than looking to the traditional sales funnel where customers are an output, we need to shift to a truely customer-centric approach. Here's an illustration which offers an iteration of the sales funnel: the flywheel.
The flywheel puts customers in the middle, with marketing, sales and service wrapped around the customer.
The flywheel asks you to solve for your customer's success - not for the business' systems.
This kind of change has to be driven from the top. And the business has to have an appetite for change. Marketers have the opportunity to own the design of the customer journey.
Or they'll just look for pricing elsewhere.
And prospects shouldn't need a math degree to understand the pricing.
More often than not, sales and marketing operate as two separate entities. While their high level thinking may be aligned in meeting the business' objectives, there isn't a clearly defined understanding of what marketing is responsible for, and what sales is responsible for, to meet these objectives. i.e. the number of leads marketing has to deliver, and how sales has to treat these. When there isn't a clearly defined understanding of goals, we hear things like:
'marketing is just a colouring-in department'
'sales don't follow up on leads'
'the leads we get are poor-quality'
'sales don't understand what we do'.
Sound familiar? Rectify this, and sales and marketing alignment will drive growth.
Businesses need;
1. A common language: agreement on clearly defined lifecycle stages, what an marketing qualified lead is, what a sales-qualified lead is, and at what stage marketing hands over to sales.
2. A service level agreement (SLA) that details;