SearchI recently read a white paper by Accenture titled Top-Five Focus Areas for Improving Sales Effectiveness Initiatives. The article focused on what they termed agile selling, the issues with the sales process today, and offered suggestions on how to improve sales effectiveness and retain customer loyalty. I focused in on improvement areas 1 & 2 as I can see how these would have a great value to any company striving to succeed and obtain a trusted partner relationship with their clients.
Agile selling is based on these 3 concepts:
- Using customer insights to differentiate the buying process
- Providing a consistent customer experience across all channels of your business
- Taking advantage of social, mobile, analytics and cloud capabilities to reduce time to marked and meet customers where they want to do business
The agile selling approach is used to improve sales effectiveness and customer loyalty. The article makes a huge point in saying that the focus of improving sales effectiveness should not just be limited to sales, but it focus should be organization wide. If your company’s sales, marketing, and service areas are not all aligned it can inhibit company growth, create missed opportunities, and can contribute to an inconsistent customer experience. There is a new reality that customer loyalty is getting more and more complex to obtain and measure, so it is important to align all assets of your company to deliver a constant and positive experience for a customer across all channels of the company.
There are 5 areas a company can work on to improve sales effectiveness:
- Interconnect and Align Sales, Marketing and Service Facets to Provide:
- A customer-centric and unified experience that will grow the customer base
- An integrated internal hand-off and process among the interconnected parts of the organization
- Improve, Integrate, and Tailor the Customer Experience and Leverage Each Touch Point with the Customer by:
- Enabling marketing to turn social media leads into sales opportunities
- Proactively engaging customer service when negative feedback is posted on social media
- Leveraging negative feedback posted about competitors into sales opportunities
- Initiating touch points with the account manager
- Assuring promises made by sales are aligned with what is delivered by the service team
- Allowing customer service and support to be consistently delivered
- Working to gain a 360-degree understanding of customers, how they work, and what their pain points are
- Accommodating to the customers communication media and style
- Tailoring a personalized message to customers across all channels (marketing, sales, service) to ensure a consistent message is delivered across all customer touchpoints
- Proactively addressing customer issues that could harm loyalty
- Targeting and solidifying customer loyalty to transform loyal customers into trusted partners
- Strengthen Immature Sales Methodologies and Processes by:
- Creating a consistent, well-adopted methodology
- Balancing the art of selling with the science of structured methodologies/processes
- Apply More Science to Sales Talent Acquisition, Development, and Retention by:
- Reducing the time it takes for a sales rep to be proficient by conducting more targeting recruiting and using a more effective on-boarding process
- Proving coaching, learning, and motivation to increase sales reps productivity
- Drive Better Outcomes from Sales Technology Enablement by:
- Leveraging social, analytics, mobility, and cloud to follow, sense, and guide customers
- Using descriptive and predictive analytics to gain a full picture view of customers and take proactive steps to keep customers
How can you use these concepts to improve your sales effectiveness?
Source: Top-Five Focus Areas for Improving Sales Effectiveness Initiatives
