How To Personalize The Customer Experience and Increase Sales
In a continuously developing digital world, consumers are used to and actually expect to have personalized customer experiences. Big tech companies like Amazon and Netflix have forged the path to personalizing the customer experience with personalized product recommendations based on historical purchases and behavioral data. Forbes recently stated, 80% of consumers are more likely to make a purchase from a brand that provides personalized experiences. The secret is out — personalized content keeps the consumer interested and engaged with your brand, which makes your sales strategy more effective.
In this article, we’ll dive into the best practices for personalizing the customer experience in sales meetings. But first, let’s ensure we understand what personalization actually is.
What is Personalization?
To personalize the customer experience is to generate content that is made for each individual lead or customer based on their needs and wants. You’ve undoubtedly had personalized customer experiences whether it be receiving an email from a large corporation addressing you by name or retargeted advertisements served up to you based on your online search history.
Take a moment and think about your personal Facebook or Instagram account. Those ads you see? They are specifically targeted to you based on your demographics and behavior. The content shown to you from the brands you follow? It’s presented to you based on your previous interactions with other user content. Accenture reported, 91% of consumers say they are more likely to shop with brands that provide offers and recommendations that are relevant to them. Personalized customer experiences keep the user, prospect, and/or customer feeling engaged and understood.
So, how do you translate this experience into a one-on-one sales meeting with a prospect?
Provide Your Contacts with Relevant Information
Enterprises across verticals have excelled at personalizing the customer experience by using customer data to tailor marketing and sales efforts to individual leads and customers. Nowadays, consumers don’t want to be broadly looped in with a large target audience, they want individualized recommendations and resources sent directly to them based on their personal preferences.
For example, let’s say a consumer clicks to download an ebook on “Best Virtual Meeting Software Platforms of 2021” through an online website and later that afternoon they receive an email from the company showcasing software products geared towards designing print materials and automated shipping. The person is likely to become confused and even frustrated by the lack of relevance in the brand’s follow on communications.
Believe it or not, a recent Gartner survey on personalization indicates that brands can potentially lose approximately 38% of their customers due to poor personalization practices. When it comes to effective sales techniques, personalizing the customer experience must remain top of mind in every interaction.
Use Personalized Presentations to Connect With Your Buyers
Due to recent stay-at-home orders and social distancing restrictions, sales teams have needed to restructure their entire sales process — and if they haven’t already or don’t plan to evolve, they are sure to fall behind the competition. Virtual selling is now the “new normal” for sales teams across the globe. With that in mind, static PowerPoint presentations no longer make the cut; they are dry and lack the personalization and interactive abilities necessary to keep the prospect interested throughout a virtual sales meeting. Interactive and personalized sales content can be up to 25 percent more effective in communicating a message than traditional presentations.
Sales professionals across all industries should be maximizing their time with prospects by personalizing their presentations. The right technology unlocks potential in a sales interaction to narrow in on exactly what your buyer is interested in seeing, like product variations specific to their use case.
In your virtual meetings, don’t tell the customer why or how your business has all the necessary tools to solve the problem they’re facing — show them. For example, let’s say you are a sales representative and want to show your customer how much money they can save by investing in your company, even if their yearly sales increase by only one percent. Sure, you could just tell the customer that increasing their sales by one percent would be more than worth the investment in your business. However, the best way to make a lasting impression is to personalize the customer experience and visualize their savings.
Think about using calculation tools in real-time during their virtual meeting to visualize possible savings in different scenarios. To continue with our example, using criteria you choose like how many salespeople the customer has at their company, how many deals each salesperson closes in any given month, how much money those deals typically close for, along with their investment in the company, you can immediately calculate their potential savings and display the approximate ROI right in front of their eyes.
Keep in mind, adequately personalizing the customer experience goes beyond the sales presentation. Your leads and customers are not communicating with your sales team in a bubble. Each person has their own interactions and touchpoints with your company’s blog, emails, social media, website, and other content you produce. Part of a great personalized customer experience is ensuring the client not only feels like but knows that you understand what they need and why your service will bring them value.
To learn more about the overall customer experience, check out our blog Customer Experience: What it is and Why it Matters.
The Positive Impact of Personalizing the Customer Experience in Sales Meetings
In a 2018 survey conducted by Adobe, 67% of consumers said it’s important for companies to automatically adjust their content based on their current context for a real-time personalized experience. Today’s prospects have expectations that have climbed even higher. They don’t want to be told how the product or service the salesperson is offering is beneficial, they want to be able to envision how their daily lives can improve.
For instance, let’s take a look at an example of an advisor selling health insurance to a prospect. Selling insurance is all about creating a dynamic and personalized dialogue between the insurance advisor and the prospect to focus on the key protections the individual prospect needs. As the conversation develops and changes direction, the insurance advisor needs to be able to present the prospect with a solution that fits their every need, keeping the experience personalized to the prospect. As the prospect provides more details about their health background, habits, and insurance requirements, the advisor is able to visually provide the prospect with helpful information tailored specifically to their needs in a dynamic presentation. As the customer experience becomes more personalized, enterprises will continue to see an increase in sales.
Final Thoughts
Start working smarter by creating a personalized customer experience that leaves a lasting, positive, impact on your customers, keeping them satisfied with your brand. With the help of innovative technology built for sales enablement, salespeople can easily personalize the customer experience by shifting the direction of their conversation based on the prospects’ questions and can visualize the value their company provides for each individual customer.
Personalize your customer experience now
Don’t fall behind your competitors, stay one step ahead with the sales enablement tool specifically designed to personalize the customer experience. Interested to see Prezentor in action?