MarketStar Blog | Sales (7)

So, you’ve heard that Customer Success is the new industry buzzword, and read a dozen articles on how you’re company can benefit from focusing on it. But where do you go from there?

In today’s world of instant messaging, customers don’t like to wait. Businesses are looking for solutions that help them provide instant service. Live chat is one such solution to which many are turning. According to Gartner, by 2018, over 80% of companies will offer some form of live chat on their website or on mobile devices.

The sales landscape has evolved dramatically, shifting power to the customer. With digitization and inbound marketing, buyers now research extensively before engaging with sales teams. 89% of B2B customers use online resources to evaluate options before connecting with a company¹.

Sales success today depends on a combination of strategy, skill, technology, and process. With buyers conducting 57% of their purchase research before engaging with a sales rep¹, traditional sales tactics are no longer enough. A well-structured sales playbook is an essential tool that streamlines processes, enhances productivity, and aligns teams for success. 

Many organizations experience friction between sales and customer support teams. Sales teams are often under pressure to meet aggressive targets, sometimes pushing leads that aren't the right fit. When these deals close, the burden shifts to customer support, which must manage customer expectations and resolve issues that could have been avoided¹. 

This disconnect creates internal distrust and diminishes customer satisfaction, leading to higher churn rates and lost revenue. The solution? Aligning sales and customer support to create a collaborative, customer-focused dynamic. 

Here’s why integrating these two teams is crucial for business success.

Moving goal posts: it’s what keeps CEOs up at night as they attempt to navigate the tide of this entirely disruptive, ever-changing digital economy. Consider Kodak. The company filed for bankruptcy in 2012, failing to realize opportunities in digital photography, a technology that it invented. How did things go so wrong for Kodak? They had the data. They had the market intelligence to make the right decision, and yet they didn’t. Many businesses are on the verge of their own ‘Kodak moment’, this time at the behest of artificial intelligence (AI), the cognitive technology that has the potential to disrupt business as we know it.

Customer experience (CX) is the emerging competitive differentiator for brands. According to Dimension Data’s ‘2017 Global Customer Experience (CX) Benchmarking Report’,¹ 70.9% of boardrooms recognize CX as their most important strategic performance measure. CX can broadly be defined as how customers perceive their interactions with your brand.

The importance of content marketing for a marketer today cannot be emphasized enough. This was reaffirmed once again when 95% of the marketers surveyed by us, claimed that content marketing is crucial to their post-sales content strategy.

Did you know that increasing your customer retention rates by as little as 5% can increase your profits by as much as 95%! Do you still wonder if you need to invest time and resources into crafting a post-sales strategy for your business?

Product demos, if done right, have the ability to shorten sales cycles, generate qualified leads, and drive conversions. For some companies, a snazzy product demo could mean getting noticed by prospects, target audiences, and sometimes even bigger giants in the same industry.