Optimising sales processes to maximise CX in 2023

In today's competitive market setting, an optimised customer experience (CX) is a must. Modern-day B2B customers seek friendly service, speed, convenience, and knowledgeable help when interacting with brands. 

Today’s buyers no longer base their purchasing decisions solely on factors such as price and quality. In fact, according to data from Salesforce, 85% of business buyers value the experience they have with a vendor at least as much as they value the company’s products and services.

Excellent customer experience facilitates better customer engagement and increases customer loyalty and conversions. It helps businesses to acquire more customers by understanding them better and offering personalised services. It ensures greater customer loyalty and improves customer retention.

However, not all companies invest in providing excellent customer experiences across all the stages of the B2B buyer's journey, despite knowing its importance and how beneficial it is for business success. Mistakenly believing that customer experience begins after sales, many look for ways to meet their customers' needs strictly as a retention play.

In reality, CX is an ongoing process. It starts as soon as a customer interacts with a brand for the first time and continues through that journey. Hence, B2B businesses must invest in crafting personalised customer experiences by understanding prospects’ behaviour and requirements, to optimise their journey with your brand for ultimate satisfaction.

In this post, we will share a few tips on how to optimise your B2B sales processes to deliver an outstanding experience. 

1. Personalise the customer journey

Personalisation is central to outstanding customer experiences. In fact, 80% of customers prefer buying from a company that offers tailored experiences. Crafting a customised experience based on their past brand interactions strengthens customer bonds and encourages them to keep coming back as they get to know you and decide whether or not to work with you.

Here are a few ways you can leverage personalisation in the sales process.

• Enable website personalisation to showcase the content according to your prospects’ interests.
• Leverage dynamic fields in your email messages to dispatch hyper-targeted nurture messages to leads.
• Connect with your customers on social media and engage them with your brand. 
• Offer personalised chat experiences to customers and provide them with fast and accurate responses to their queries.

Personalising the customer communication process across all the stages of the buyer's journey helps businesses provide a cohesive experience to the customers.

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Using the account-based marketing (ABM) approach, you can create personalised micro websites for each target account, serving up dynamic content experiences based on demographic and psychographic data, along with past and current interactions.

Terminus is an all-in-one account-based marketing platform that offers excellent tools for account-based sales, web personalisation, sales intelligence, and more. It provides businesses with a 360-degree view of customer data and helps in building excellent digital content to streamline communication and optimise sales. 

2. Shorten the sales cycle

The longer it takes for the sales team to follow up with customers, the less likely they are to close a sale. With this in mind, identifying the bottlenecks in your existing processes and reducing the lag time is the best approach to shorten the sales cycle. If you know what your leads need to understand so they can make smart purchase decisions, then you can make sure to feed them this information in an accelerated cadence, which also helps them hit their own targets faster. 

Start documenting your current sales processes and run CRM reports on the amount of time sales representatives take to close a deal. Identify the areas of improvement by taking into consideration the customers' needs. Make small yet significant changes to processes and analyse how these changes are affecting the sales cycle length.  

Here are a few tactics to help you speed up your sales cycle efficiently.

• Follow up with your prospects and customers by increasing the frequency of your calls or messages.
• Reduce the amount of time the sales representatives require to schedule product demos.
• Provide the customers with comprehensive resources that will educate them about your product.

Remember, do not let decreasing the sales cycle length hamper the quality of the service you offer to your customers. 

3. Leverage process automation

B2B sales is a time-sensitive process and can be exhausting. The performance of sales professionals might suffer if they are assigned tedious manual tasks in addition to selling, leading to lengthy sales cycles. These inconsistent sales cycles also could create a bad impression on your customers and discourage them from purchasing your products. Hence, you ought to automate as much of your sales process as possible.

In fact, businesses can automate over 30% of sales activities, including pipeline management, sales follow-ups and appointment scheduling. Process automation empowers your sales team to deliver excellent customer experiences and eliminate the risk of losing customers to the competition.

Digitising key parts of sales workflows and processes can help businesses build a loyal customer base, reduce churn, and grow their revenue. This will free up your team's time, enabling them to build lasting relationships with the customers. From the first sales discovery call to the completion of the purchase and ongoing customer support, you can personalise your interactions with the customers through every stage of the buying lifecycle.

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For example, instead of creating contracts manually, you can leverage a CPQ and contract management solution like DealHub to help sales professionals to create sales contracts, agreements, proposals, and other documents seamlessly and expedite the contract signing process. This tool helps in automating contract approval workflows and collaborating with stakeholders and customers without any hassles. 

It’s all informed by data that sales reps enter over the course of their nurture interactions, fully synced with your CRM. Further, e-signatures and contract storage enable you to track and manage the signed documents for future reference. By managing all of these interactions and file shares in a dedicated “deal room” interface, you can help to keep everyone aligned and all resources as accessible as possible. 

4. Gather customer feedback

To deliver excellent customer experiences, listening to your customers and understanding their requirements is essential. Hence, the sales team must invest in a feedback-capturing tool that gathers customer feedback across all the stages of the buyer's journey. 

The customers' responses to the feedback surveys will help you understand the sentiments behind their actions and tailor your customer experiences to improve the sales processes. For instance, post a survey on social media for your brand followers to understand what they think of your brand. Similarly, send a post-sale survey requesting the customers to share their experience with the sales representative to gain insights into the performance of your sales team.

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Typeform is one of the best survey builders that enables you to create engaging surveys for your customers. Design a survey form using the templates from the templates library or create a survey from scratch. Enable conditional logic to ask the right questions while allowing the customers to skip the rest. 

Besides conditional logic, you can add open-text questions to your surveys and capture your customer's thoughts. Typeform integrates with various AI-based tools to provide in-depth analysis of the survey responses thereby helping the sales team make informed CX decisions. 

5. Monitor CX metrics

Identify, track, and measure the right metrics to understand the performance of your CX efforts. These insights will also help you optimise your existing sales processes and improve sales team performance. 

Here are some of the most important CX metrics that every sales team must track.

• Net Promoter Score (NPS) - Net Promoter Score is calculated based on a single survey question that asks the customers to rate how likely they would recommend a product or service to their connections. NPS surveys help brands gauge customer satisfaction and loyalty.
• Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT) - Customer Satisfaction Score is a metric that helps businesses understand how satisfied a customer is with the overall experience or a particular interaction with the brand.
• Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) - Customer lifetime value is the measure of the total revenue an average customer is expected to bring to your business as long as that person or firm remains your client. 
• Churn rate - Commonly known as customer churn or rate of attrition, the churn rate is the percentage of customers who stop renewing their subscriptions or cancelled their subscriptions during a certain period.

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You can leverage data visualisation and management tools like Databox that collates performance data from multiple platforms in one place and provides intelligent insights about business performance in the form of daily scorecards, weekly reports, and more.

Wrapping up

Sales process optimisation is not a one-time fix. It is an ongoing process that needs to be constantly monitored and revamped to create a great customer experience. 

In this post, we have shared a few amazing tactics you can implement to optimise your sales process for maximising CX. So, focus on the customer's journey with your brand, identify the problems, offer solutions and opportunities, and create a lasting relationship to boost sales and revenue.