MarketStar Blog

B2B sales has become increasingly complex in recent years. Simply put, the salesperson is no longer in charge of the sales process. Sample these facts:1 

Key Insights

• In today’s competitive marketplace, companies give much importance to finding, targeting, and acquiring new customers

• In the process of new customer acquisition, they often tend to overlook the significance of staying connected with existing customers 

• Organizations, across all sectors, should take cognizance of existing customers. Such customers contribute massively to sales, if treated with care

Acquiring new customers is expensive. Selling to existing customers is a more pocket-friendly approach.

However, providing superior customer service is also not a guarantee for better sales with 54% of all consumers having higher expectations from brands, according to a Microsoft report.

While companies tend to give much importance to finding, targeting, and acquiring new customers, they often overlook the significance of staying connected with existing customers.

But it has never been as vital to sustaining your existing customers. In fact, they contribute massively to sales if treated with care. According to a report by Bain & Company, a 5% increase in customer retention produces more than a 25% increase in profit.

Building relationships with your existing customers is a unique way to increase sales.

We have listed 7 top-notch strategies for you. If you manage to improve every step of your sales process by even a little, your sale increases by a lot.

7 Easy-to-Implement Hacks to Boost Sales with Existing Customers

1. Research Your Market

Open the door to new, untapped opportunities with market research and analytics.

It is one of the best strategies to increase sales. By taking a deeper look into the market you serve, you can better understand who your customers are, what they want, and identify their pain points.

You can collate feedback through surveys, listen to your customers through social media, read trade articles, and mine data from Google Analytics to understand the critical elements.

2. Understand Customer Behavior

Selling to existing customers will be impossible without understanding customer behavior, a vital element of your marketing campaign.

Understand how your customers relate to your products or services. Try answering questions such as:

• Do they rely on just a single feature or more?

• Are they having issues with one of your product features? 

This will help you to determine whether you need to provide upgrades in certain areas or not. Another approach is to provide personalized services or training to customers. Using this method will help you to enrich or extend your relationship with your existing customers. 

3. Run Promotions

An equally effective strategy to boost sales is to reward your existing customers.

Promotions that reward old customers will go a long way in improving their loyalty and increase sales figures significantly.

The frequency of promotions can be weekly, monthly, quarterly, or annually. What matters is that it doesn’t stress your business. You must plan for promotions so that they don’t wear you out. 

4. Update Your Offering

As your business grows, your offerings will change. Turn to your existing customers when it comes to deciding what offerings to eliminate and where you can utilize opportunities.

An easy strategy to boost sales is to look at the items that your customer base ignores.

Low sales items also clutter your business. When you strip away such items, your customers can focus on the products and services that they want.

Another factor for you to avoid is offering a large variety of products in each product line.

Such an approach increases the cognitive load that may lead to inertia which interferes with decision-making. All of us have experienced some kind of cognitive overload when it comes to making a purchase decision by scrolling through page after page of offerings on Amazon or eBay.

5. Upsell and Cross-sell

Selling to existing customers will be incomplete without upselling and cross-selling. In fact, cross-selling can increase sales by 20% and profits by 30%, according to McKinsey research. 

Your biggest hurdle, which is the initial buy, is over now. You have established trust, and your customer has formed a favorable opinion about your business. Now, it’s time to think of the next step. 

An upsell takes place when you convince a customer to buy more than they originally planned. On the other hand, cross-selling happens when the customer buys a different product or service.

6. Tell Your Story

Visual mechanisms can be your companion to increase sales from existing customers. Visual aids and infographics can help you spur into action.

This type of approach makes messages actionable while subtly convincing existing customers to make more purchases. The idea is to show customers how you plan to solve their problems with your offering.

With visual mechanisms, it becomes easier to encourage the customer to close the sale.

7. After-sales Service

According to a study conducted by Shep Hyken’s CX consulting firm, 96% of customers will leave business if they receive bad service.

When it comes to selling more to existing customers, you cannot ignore after-sales service. If you abandon your customers after the sale, they won’t come back in the future.

Wrapping Up

It is critical to remember that you are building the customer and not the sale. When you succeed in this, your sales will increase.

Considering the intrinsic role of sales in business growth, you must find effective strategies to increase sales and implement those for boosting sales, increasing customer lifetime value, and better ROI. 

Lead nurturing is an excellent way to advance prospects further along the purchase funnel. While marketers acknowledge this and use it in order to generate qualified leads, they often complain that it does not give the best results. Whether you are already using lead nurturing to manage leads, or are planning to use it in the future, here are some facts that will help you find success with your lead nurturing efforts: 

Customers today want personalized, relevant content, and they want a consistent experience across all digital content channels. They also want anywhere, anytime access to content. While enterprises have managed to create a variety of great content to cater to this demand, they spend a lot of time and money in creating the same type of content again and again, duplicating efforts and repeating redundant processes. All this because of the lack of a mature approach to manage content. 

Enterprises continue to use legacy multiple platforms and solutions to store, manage, and distribute content. Instead of the ad hoc use of technology, enterprises need a Content Maturity Model to manage and monetize their content assets. Marriott’s content strategy is a great example of how an enterprise can completely reinvent its content strategy to stay competitive.1  

A content maturity model helps enterprises: 

Although Business-to-consumer (B2C) ventures have caught most of our attention, a number of factors still stand in the way of a successful takeoff. Affordability is still a problem, with connectivity rates not dropping fast enough. Many consumers are also taken by “app fatigue”, as having to coordinate between dozens of apps that each control one or a few of the smart devices or appliances in their lives is making life more cumbersome than convenient for them.1 More importantly, consumer-facing ventures are still struggling to find the balance between innovation and familiarity, to find ways to incrementally introduce users to digitally-oriented behavior patterns. 

For most businesses, the primary means of growth involves constant acquisition of new customers along with nurturing of existing customers. Through marketing on the internet, you can create customer acquisition programs while being able to track costs associated with each new customer and limit risk on advertising and marketing programs. This also amounts to new lead-generation and conversions for almost every company anywhere in the world. 

Developing an internet marketing plan and designing a great website is not good enough. Measuring the results and making the changes to the internet marketing and website design based upon the positive and negative feedback of the visitor’s response is imperative. 

So, what are the elements of online marketing that help generate quality leads, increase conversion rate and justify your marketing spend? A typical online marketing campaign consists of a combination of some or all of the following marketing techniques: 

When it’s time to let the world know what you’ve been working on, there are no end of strategies to consider for success. However, no matter what your product is, there are certain universal truths that you can apply to your SaaS marketing campaign, regardless of channel or audience. 

Introduction 

A 2019 report by LinkedIn states that soft skills training (honing creativity, persuasion, analytical reasoning, collaboration, and adaptability) forms one of the top seven focus areas for employers.1 In building soft skills, one of the most useful and popular tools is role-playing, which finds application in diverse fields ranging from the educational to the corporate environment. 

Role-playing allows a learner to assume the role or tasks of a job by practicing or simulating real working conditions. The primary objectives of role-playing are to learn, improve, or build upon the skills or competencies necessary for a specific position or outcome. In the sales context, the trainee practices the role that he or she is expected to perform (such as initiating a sales conversation or closing a sale) with one or more “customers," played by a more experienced peer, manager, or, at times, even a professional actor.  

Such role-plays are often conducted with an entire group of sales reps who observe each individual role-play. The role-plays can either be scripted for a sales rep, containing appropriate cues to steer the conversation, or the conversation can be improvised for each scenario. The idea is to simulate real-life sales situations as a way to resolve them. 

In the corporate scenario, role-playing for sales training leads to several desirable individual and organizational learning outcomes. 

Partner sales enablement, also referred to variously as channel sales enablement, reseller enablement or sales enablement channel management, involves providing channel partners with the necessary training, tools and resources to successfully sell vendor products and maximize revenue. For vendors, this function is crucial because of the changing nature of the sales process, wherein buyers are taking more control of their purchase journey and demanding higher quality inputs from their interactions with the sales team. Leveraging the partner channel helps meet customer needs better in this environment. 

Finding success with the partner channel isn’t as simple as just contracting them to sell your products, though. It requires strategic planning, engagement and support to get partners to sell your products as best as they can. Getting the maximum leverage out of a sales enablement effort requires smart strategy and meticulous planning in order to align business processes with the technological advantages provided by an enablement platform. 

Here are 8 steps to keep in mind while laying out a partner enablement roadmap and strategy: 

It is estimated that in 2017, over 1.66 billion people worldwide bought goods online. In the US alone, e-retail sales amounted to 2.3 trillion dollars, which according to experts, is projected to grow to 4.48 trillion USD by 2021.¹ Online shopping is no longer the fragile bubble it was in the 1990s. It is a thriving industry that has become a way of life for most of us.