MarketStar Blog

Establishing a proactive sales operations approach is necessary if you want to gain more business or cross-sell to existing clients. On the other hand, a reactive approach is haphazard and just doesn’t work out in the long run. Being proactive in your sales strategy entails planning, profiling targeted accounts, finalizing and executing account strategies, and creating a process to receive continuous feedback to improve performance. When done right, it leads to more sales revenue.

Key Insights

• There is not a single business in the world that can say that they haven’t lost a customer. And every business employs a different approach to handling it. 

• While some look for new customers to equalize the loss, others put their focus on analyzing what went wrong and how to stop it from happening further. 

• This problem is called customer churn. Your churn rate denotes the number of customers who are leaving your product or service during a given time period.

A HubSpot report highlights that generating leads and enhancing customer engagement strategies are the top priorities for over 50% of companies today.

Organizations, irrespective of their sector, spend vast amounts of resources and energies to reduce churn because your churn highlights how happy your customers are with you.

Despite its importance, many organizations struggle in implementing successful user engagement strategies to reduce churn. So how do you reduce churn? This article deep dives into this very problem.

1. Analyze Your Market

While an obvious step to reduce churn, it is also a crucial one. You must find out why your customers left. Talking to such customers and getting to know them is one way to go about it. It is also an excellent way to demonstrate that you care.

You should actively make use of all media channels such as phone, e-mail, website, live chat, and social media. Surveys can be a useful tactic too if customers don’t want to talk.

2. Proactively Communicate

An important step in reducing customer churn is to actively engage with your customers. This is called relationship marketing wherein you take decisive steps in delighting your customers and showing them value in your product/service so they have a reason to keep coming back.

As a starting point, provide your customers with versatile content that deals with the key benefits of your product. It should include regular update announcements and news about special offers.

Simply put, when you engage proactively with your customers, you address their pain points, build trust, and brand preference which translates into a substantial increase in revenue streams.

3. Create Your Customer Roadmap

Getting started with a new product can be overwhelming for your customers. And if they are not able to figure out how to navigate through, they will lose interest, adding to your overall customer churn. 

Your customer engagement strategy here is to ease their transition by setting up an effective onboarding process or roadmap. Such a process will guide new customers through your products, their features, functions, and processes. 

Such a strategy also gives you greater control over how you want to supplement the information to your customers. Remember that your goal is to empower your customers. So it is vital that you constantly monitor and iterate your onboarding process.

4. Incentivize Your Customers

Give your customers a reason to stick around.

Offer them something special such as promo codes, discounts, and loyalty programs among others. These small steps can prove to be quite effective in reducing churn and showing your customers that you value them and their business.

A vital point to remember is the time in your customer’s lifecycle when you should offer these incentives. For instance, it can be at the end of your customer’s journey when you are not sure if they will go for a renewal. You can provide a discounted renewal rate to help them finalize their decision.

5. Focus on Customer Service

Many of the big companies made it big because of their focus on providing stellar customer service. It is an excellent way to prevent churn. Your service reps should be empowered to solve your customers’ queries in a timely manner.

An Oracle report states that incompetent staff and slow service are the top two reasons for customers leaving a company.

Enhance your customer service capabilities by upskilling your labor force or outsourcing your customer success operations.

6. Employ Success Managers

You can employ customer success managers to ensure that your most valuable customers are taken care of.

Your managers will provide your customers with the right input to maximize their investment in your product.

For your customers, they become the main point of contact, paving the way for more personalized interaction. 

A success manager will take care of the following points:

• Identifying those customers who are planning to leave your product or service 

• Nurture the relationship and make them stay

• Make way for stronger and persistent communication

The Bottomline  

There are two reasons why reducing customer churn should be at the top of your mind. 

The first is the financial aspect. 

According to Forrester, it costs 5 times more for companies to acquire new customers than it does to keep the existing ones. The second reason is that the more customers a business retains, the higher its revenue will be. 

But it all boils down to analyzing the right reasons behind your churn rate and swiftly acting on them. However, do keep in mind that you won’t go from 10-15% to 1-2% within a week or even overnight. 

Reducing your churn rates is a process that you need to improvise as you go along but it’s worth the time and effort invested. 

Best of luck!

“The biggest sources of opportunity are collaboration and partnership. And today, with digital communication, there is more of that everywhere. We need to expose ourselves to that as a matter of doing business.” – Mark Parker (CEO, Nike, Inc.)

Key Takeaways

• Implementing RevOps to unify and streamline your GTM operations can have numerous benefits for your organization–from increasing revenue coordination to better business-wide accountability

• It’s a big change. As you get started with it, it is essential that your current processes don’t pose a hindrance to your big plans 

• As a crucial component of any organization, your tech stack deserves the same attention as your RevOps strategy. It’s how you will be able to scale your GTM initiatives 

• It can be confusing to build your ideal tech stack. But once done, it can go a long way in ensuring that your various customer-facing teams have access to the same data. This will help you optimize your workflows and infuse new efficiency in your campaigns 

Advancements in tech stack and increasingly sophisticated buyer behaviors have mandated an evolution in operating models if enterprises hope to stay ahead.

Organizations, especially those in the B2B space, are increasingly opting for newer approaches to enhance their customer acquisition and retention strategies.

The concept of centralizing teams from marketing, sales, and customer success–the core concept behind RevOps–has become popular to accelerate revenue growth and go-to-market operations.

Companies are reporting significant gains in terms of accelerated revenue growth, about 100% to 200% increases in digital marketing ROI and 30% reductions in GTM expenses, according to a BCG report.

The importance of delivering a successful RevOps initiative relies heavily on having a deep understanding of the right technology stack which will support a well-aligned RevOps strategy.

But the sheer number of software and apps available for RevOps can make it a daunting task. Additionally, you don’t want too many systems in your technology stack as this can lead to limitations in individual systems.

Having said that, a full tech stack that is aligned with your RevOps strategy can be the game-changer you are looking for to align your sales, marketing, and customer success teams while ensuring streamlined workflows, in order to capitalize on growth opportunities.

How Does RevOps Affect Your Technology Stack?

No two businesses are the same.

This also means that not every tech stack is affected the same way by RevOps. While some companies require a complete overhaul of their RevOps tech stack, others might see no change.

The tech stack previously selected by your sales, marketing, and service teams provided each individual function with its capabilities. So the tools used by your service team were vastly different from those used by marketing. This changes with RevOps.

With RevOps in the picture, the underlying goal is to structure technology in such a way that it supports the customer journey across all touchpoints while unlocking more of your organization’s revenue potential.

A technological audit as part of your RevOps framework can help you get started. It will help you analyze the various gaps in achieving the ideal tech stack.

How to Evaluate the Ideal Tech Stack for Your RevOps Strategy? 

A hard look at your existing systems as part of your revenue operations practice can help you assess the gaps in your current tech stack and how the addition of any new software fits with the overall goals of your GTM operations.

• Start with Business Process Evaluation: Begin with a thorough map-out of your customer’s journey. Then document all the processes that your customer-facing teams go through.

• Do a Little Research: The purpose of this market research is to gather all relevant data about the tools that should be part of your organization’s revenue tech stack.

• Cost-benefit Analysis: When you map out each of your GTM functions with the tools available in the market, you will gain a better understanding of the software that will make up your ideal tech stack. 

How to Build the Perfect Tech Stack for RevOps?

In “The State of Business Operations in 2021” report, conducted by Tonkean and Lucid of 500 companies and IT professionals, only 24% of respondents were satisfied with their current toolset handling all workflow needs.

An ideal tech stack for revenue operations will include tools that monitor top-line data that can be easily integrated with other apps. Remember that your tools should help you scale your RevOps strategy and achieve overall business operations.

1. Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Software

Since aligning and unifying your organization’s various functions under one umbrella is what RevOps is all about, it makes sense to start with CRM to get all your customer data into one place.

A CRM software will centralize customer data, putting it in one easy-to-access place.

This means that even if your data is coming from various sources such as Google Analytics, Social Media portals, and other apps, the chosen CRM for your tech stack will sort, clean, analyze, and store data in actionable formats.

For your marketing, sales, and service teams, this data serves as the single source of truth for their various campaigns.

2.Revenue Intelligence Software

Driven by Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML), Revenue Intelligence Software streamlines data gathering, synchronization, and management across your customer-facing functions. 

Such software is incredibly helpful as it eliminates siloed data entry that can potentially hamper the success of your GTM operations. Since it automatically captures data at every touchpoint, your teams have more accurate and reliable insights to fall on. 

This also means that your sales reps have better leads to deal with since your teams are better equipped to assess the direction of customer conversation as it unfolds. Consequently, you also allocate resources to the right team, expediting the lead qualification process, and optimizing conversions.

3. Project Management Tools

Collaboration is key to success for RevOps and project management tools can help you achieve it. Teams have a centralized place to effectively work on cross-cutting revenue-related activities.

Such tools are useful in the end-to-end management of projects, including task ownership, and deadline adherence. 

Bridging the Gap Between Strategy & Tech

A HubSpot report highlights that a whopping 61% of B2B businesses leveraging technology and automation in their sales processes will exceed revenue operations.

Selecting the ideal tech stack is your first step to scaling your RevOps strategy and streamlining sales.

As daunting a task it may seem, you can ease the process by understanding what your RevOps team needs in order to function properly. Build on this understanding to lay down the foundation of your RevOps technology stack.

Looking for the right RevOps strategy to compliment your GTM initiatives? Head over to our blog and read more about the top 5 areas of consideration for RevOps success!

The underlying purpose of sales enablement is, essentially, to improve sales outcomes. While this is an admittedly reductive and oversimplified statement, it holds true and serves the purpose in this context because as soon as you consider this, the need to measure and track various metrics around sales enablement becomes immediately apparent. After all, how would you know if you’ve improved something without measuring it?

Most individuals have come to know and understand the Pareto principle of 80/20, conceptualized by Vilfredo Federico Damaso Pareto, born in 1848.  Rumor has it that one day Pareto noticed that 20% of his pea plants in his garden generated 80% of the healthy pods.  Upon further research and understanding into different industries, he came up with the well-known and generalized result of 80% of the results will come from 20% of the actions. Over the years we have come to accept this principle in many aspects of business life. For example, it is often assumed that 80% of revenue comes from 20% of customers or 20% of a company’s products represent 80% of the sales, and so on. 

In large organizations with teams spread across time zones, coaching is a problem of scale. The inability of managers to find time to address the learning needs of individual sales reps reduces coaching to being reactionary when good or bad outcomes happen. An integrated sales enablement and coaching platform with AI capabilities is perhaps just what the doctor ordered to overcome this problem. So, how can AI help in coaching? Here are six ways how it can.

For your business to grow, it is vital that you have a good product and a good sales and marketing team. But to sustain this growth, one must be on top of the game in a rapidly transforming market space. 

Key Takeaways: 

The COVID-19 pandemic has forced B2B sales organizations to reinvent themselves at an unprecedented pace. While sales reps find themselves in the relatively unchartered territory of remote selling, organizations have to contend with providing training and coaching to the sales teams remotely. Virtual training methods have been steadily gaining ground as the preferred mode for imparting sales training even before the current crisis. The coronavirus pandemic has made this transition more urgent.

There is no doubt that the COVID-19 pandemic has permanently changed the way we do business, including how we sell enterprise technology. With employees working from home, licenses for on-premise enterprise software are being replaced by software-as-a-service (SaaS) subscriptions. Cloud solutions have been with us for some time, and adoption has accelerated thanks to the pandemic.