The B2B sales model is often characterized by a lot of middlemen such as distributors, channel partners and authorized resellers. When selling through different channels, it often happens that the vendor/company loses sight of the big picture and many times ends up focusing more on them and inadvertently ignoring the end consumer. While companies must certainly focus on their partners and distributors, improving prospect experience is what will help them achieve their ultimate goal–increased sales revenues. This blog discusses how companies can improve prospect experience and thus help partners and distributors sell more, faster.
Start right: Adopt a customer-centric approach to everything you do
The first step is to instill a customer first attitude in the organization, across all departments and functions. Question every process, every step in each process. Companies need to start by asking the question, “Is this process/step helping our end-consumers, If so, how?”. If the answer is a clear, ‘YES’., the process/step stays intact, otherwise, it signals the need to modify it for greater impact on the customer.
Top-down approach to improving customer experience
The key to successfully improving consumer experience with your brand is to start from the top. The management has to decide and work towards creating a customer centric business by implementing policies and processes that support this goal. The overall work environment and company culture should be centered around providing superior customer experience at every stage of the buyer’s journey.
Train your employees and partners
The next step is to let the idea of customer centricity flow seamlessly down the organizational ladder, covering every aspect/person that is associated with the company. This includes channel partners, distributors, resellers, direct sales teams, even client services and after-sales support. Every employee and channel partner should be made aware of this idea and trained to behave accordingly in every opportunity presented to them.
Understand your consumers/prospects and their journey
Understanding the end consumers and their purchase journey will help organizations adopt a customer-centric approach that is actually effective. The modern buyer’s journey is not linear. Plus, it is characterized by multiple touchpoints that are spread across online and offline avenues. The modern buyer’s journey is also heavily tilted in the favor of the buyer owing to increased competition as the marketplace today is more global than local, and also because the buyer today has a lot of information at their disposal, thanks to the internet. This means, salespeople and channel partners have a smaller window to reach out to the prospect and influence to make a purchase decision in their favor. Companies that understand the buyer and the buyer’s journey are able to provide their sales networks–direct and indirect, with the knowledge, tools and customer-centric messaging they need to make a strong impact in the short window available to them.
Measure, measure, measure!
Companies need to track and measure the effectiveness of their customer-centricity efforts. This is important because only measuring the key performance indicators (KPIs) will help them understand if their customer-centric activities are effective, help them identify the gaps and opportunities for improvement. You cannot fix what you cannot measure!
Identify the KPIs to be tracked and measured
The next step in the process would be to identify the KPIs that need to be tracked and measured. Here are some of them-
- Lead-to-customer ratio: This is the percentage of the total number of leads (prospects) that are converted into a sale (Customer)
- Lead-to-opportunity ratio: This is the percentage of of the total number of leads that that are converted into an opportunity, which may or may not have closed.
- Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs) Vs. Sales Qualified Leads (SQLs) Vs. Closed: Thiis the percentage of the total number of leads that were qualified (thought to be a good fit) by Marketing, sales and finally, converted into a sale (Closed).
- Training & Certification: This indicator is especially important as it helps understand if the company’s training efforts in terms of helping their sales channels adopt a customer-centric approach has been successful. Related KPIs include data about to salespeople’s and partner’s training attendance, certification attained, training material downloaded and accessed.
Tracking the KPIs will help organizations understand if there’s a leaky sales funnel and the reason behind it that’s causing prospects to fall off the funnel before they are converted into a customer. They can use this information to plug in the gaps and adopt a stronger, prospect-centric sales and marketing strategy. It will also help vendors identify partners who are not performing well and probe further to uncover the challenges faced by them when selling.
Adopt One Voice as an organization
In order to provide superior customer experience, you need to adopt One Voice as an organization. Your messaging and attitude have to be customer-centric and the same across all channels–direct, indirect, online and offline. You can achieve this goal by deploying a guided sales process using sales playbooks, content syndication and powerful for-partner marketing campaigns that amplify corporate messaging at local, end-consumer levels.
The role of direct and partner enablement platforms in helping companies adopt a customer/prospect-centric approach
By bringing together the various elements involved in the process together and infusing transparency and measurability to the whole process, sales and partner enablement software programs play a critical role in helping organizations adopt and maintain a customer/prospect-centric approach effectively.
