Accelerating Revenue Growth
SHOCK ALERT:
Gartner states that only 6% of sales leaders say they are extremely confident in their team's ability to meet or exceed revenue growth goals.
Existing Customers
New Customers
Customer Confidence
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BE A SENSEMAKER
As a sales leader, you must help your reps be a sense maker in every deal. Here are some ideas on how to build the core competency of your reps on sense making approaches to win.
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Reps must strategically curate information to select, organize, present, and teach the customer the unique differentiators.
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Reps must prescriptively guide the customer to the key points within each information source to make it easy to consume the information.
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Reps must lead and offer information to evaluate, rationalize and consume the guidance given.
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Reps must judiciously select information that is critical to buying without overwhelming them in the sales process.
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BECOME A SENSE MAKER IN A SEA OF COMPETITION
BUYER'S ENABLEMENT | BUYER'S JOURNEY
What does the buyer's journey look like for an existing customer?
What does the buyer's journey look like for a new customer?
How does your strategy for each of these journeys deliver against your revenue goals?
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DIFFERENTIATORS
Red flag alerts should go off if you have heard your prospects say:
"Your offering looks exactly like what your competitor offers."
"Your information appeared trustworthy but felt contradictory to everything else I've learned."
"It was difficult to decide between the vendors and their capabilities."
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DECISION MAKERS
If you think there are only 1 or 2 decision-makers involved in the buying process, you're likely mistaken.
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SALES ORGANIZATION
If you believe that your buyers prefer to interact with a knowledgeable sales representative, be aware that over 50% actually desire a sales experience without a rep.
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STRATEGIC ROADMAP
Do your prospects and existing customers understand what the buyer's journey could look like to ensure their success?
Are the sales stages aligned with a buyer's journey; and that they make sense to your prospects and existing customers?
Have you build in key differentiators along the entire journey?
Do you offer prescriptive advice (what to do, how to do it) for your reps at each stage? ​
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​Here is an example of building a strategic roadmap of the buyer's journey using best practice "wins" that are fully aligned to the sales cycles to shape and sharpen buyer CONFIDENCE in the sales cycle.
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Blurred but illustrates the level of effort while also safeguarding the company's details!
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BUILD A DISTINCTIVE & DELIBERATE PATH TO DIFFERENTIATE FROM COMPETITORS​
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You must guide your customer to evidence​.
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There is so much information. Help customer make sense of it.
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Build this information into sales cycles and reinforce within the CRM.
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Always prioritize simplicity for your customers over comprehensive detail.
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Remember that over 50% of customers don't even want to interact with you so make it easy by simplifying.
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What is Customer Experience
CX Defined
Hint: It is more than customer service!
CX
DEFINED
How can we anticipate and prevent issues rather than just respond to them?
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In the customer experience industry, there's a prevalent issue which is reducing "CX" to merely the operations of the contact center. While the contact center is undeniably important—often serving as the first point of contact when customers face challenges or have complex needs—it's only one component of the broader customer experience landscape. Conflating CX with the contact center is not just an oversimplification; it's a strategic misstep that can impede business growth.
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Why is this distinction crucial? Customer experience encompasses the entire journey, from initial research on your organization to final purchase, including every interaction in between. It involves website usability, product quality, product enhancement needs, ease of use, reliability, billing, training, customer support, etc.
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Limiting CX to the contact center is akin to outfitting your car with a new set of tires while ignoring a faulty starter — it won’t get you very far. Contact centers are essential for generating valuable customer interaction data and this rich data can be a starting place for data analysis, but it isn’t the full picture. Linking CX solely with contact center activities means merely reacting to issues rather than proactively managing them.
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Comprehensive CX is a strategic, cross-functional approach that proactively addresses customer needs across all touchpoints, well in advance of any direct communication with a contact center.
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To genuinely enhance customer experience, consider the entire customer journey: How can we anticipate and prevent issues rather than just respond to them? If you're committed to transforming CX, it's essential to view it as more than just customer service.
Customer Experience
Commit to a customer first mentality. Customers must come first or they will move their business; which is easier than ever with SaaS. They don't expect perfection but they do expect responsiveness and accountability. Every organization must strive to provide the best customer experience at every stage of the relationship.
Agent Experience
If you commit to a customer first mentality, you are headed in the right direction. If you meet the customer where they are in expectations, you will find that you are most effective in keeping your agents happy. Giving customers a consistent experience will also offer your agents consistency.
Transformation
Digital transformation is a revolutionary and innovative process for organizations to transform their business by leveraging digital technology. It enables automation of processes and optimization of customer experience. It offers a business to remain competitive in today's digital world.
Data Governance
Data Governance provides a framework for creating and maintaining policies, processes, and procedures for data management across an organization. Data Governance can provide organizations with greater insight into their data and the ability to make more informed decisions in real or near-real time.
Innovation
Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) empowers businesses to innovate and change with technology and/or software as the enabler and a structured process for implementing and using the innovation. There must be a commitment from all levels of the organization to the change and collaboration needed for success.
SaaS & CCaaS
Staying with CCaaS and SaaS for this discussion, COVID provided a huge boost in demand for this market.  SaaS and CCaaS companies changed the game leaving on-premise software companies in the dust by offfering cloud-based options with flexibility and agility to manage their contact centers. With SaaS and CCaaS, Contact Centers were able to adjust to remote workforce, and change or spin up new centers in days rather than months. ​A true CCaaS platform allows all touch points to be streamlined into a single platform.  This includes all the digital channels that customers want and need to interact with Contact Centers such as email, chat, text (SMS), social media, etc. ​CCaaS enables a more personalized customer experience, offers real-time omnichannel communication and improves agent efficiency and effectiveness measures. Typically CCaaS has products such as ACD, CTI, IVR, Queuing, Routing, Call Recording, Analytics, ML/AI, Workforce Planning, Omni Channel Capabilities, Reporting and Business Inteligence. ​Often CCaaS companies partner with SaaS companies to bring in functionality that doesn't already exist in their CCaaS platform.   This might happen, for example, through an OEM agreement or a defined partnership.  ​Services such as custom integration, API (app programming interface), implementation, training and consulting may be added to streamline and/or minimize the touch points. ​The ROI (return on investment) is typically discussed in terms of flexibility in budgeting, accessibility, enhanced functionality, continuous deployment, scalabilty, reduced cost of infrastructure and associated headcount, etc. ​As more and more companies look to CCaaS and SaaS options, it is more important than ever to proactively address concerns such as consumer trust, data protection, storage, security, and fraud.  ​It is also important to mention that with any "as a service" platform, your clients expect that you look at customer experience across their entire lifecycle. It is easier than ever for clients to change their vendor to another cloud-based option.