Buyer engagement, understanding the customer’s preferences and providing them with the best products, services and experience are the foundations of Sales. And Salespeople across the globe work incredibly hard to build this engagement for their organizations and personalize experiences for their customers. But as per a recent post from Gartner, 72% of buyers prefer a rep-free experience. Not only that, it takes 66 touchpoints to book ONE qualified meeting in an environment where the average number of potential stakeholders continues to grow, ranging from 11 to 20. That is a lot of hours for sales teams and an incredibly lengthy sales cycle for organizations.
Recognizing this, organizations are deploying multiple strategies to optimize their marketing efforts and streamline their sales process. Here are the four ways Gartner recommends to boost buyer engagement:
1. Target Multiple Buyers: Connect and nurture as many stakeholders as possible. These could be executive decision-makers, business owners, end-users, IT, Operations, procurement or anyone else who can influence the sale.
2. Understand your Buyer: For all stakeholders, understand their goals, priorities and preferences.
3. Develop Value-Driven Insights: Based on their responses, tailor your offerings and messaging. Measure the effectiveness of these changes and create a feedback loop to increase engagement continuously.
4. Execute and Measure Messaging Insights at Scale: Share the insights and targeted messaging with the team to drive results a scale.
How can Technology help boost buyer engagement?
Understand and Target multiple buyers using a Customer Data Platform
Often, there is a lot that organizations already know about their customers. But this information is in multiple mailboxes, disconnected systems and spread across the different teams. Using a Customer Data Platform, you can quickly bring all the data together from your various systems and take the first step at gaining a deeper understanding of your customers and stakeholders.
Microsoft’s Customer Data Platform also comes with out-of-the-box AI models that can help recommend products, understand their sentiment and predict their lifetime value and churn score. Bringing together your data enables you to segment your customer like never before and identify new opportunities.
Develop Value Driven Insights using Salesforce Automation
Help your sales teamwork smarter by leveraging email and messaging templates and automating the typically recurring touchpoints in a sales cycle. This can help your sellers to connect to more stakeholders in less time. These interactions can also help you, as an organization, to understand the effectiveness of your messaging and the common roadblocks in your sales cycle.
Leveraging tools such as Microsoft’s Dynamics 365 for Sales that use Artificial Intelligence to score your leads based on how they engage with your communications. The Lead and Opportunity scores help your sellers prioritize activities with the highest impact, accelerating revenue for your organization.
Execute Messaging Insights at scale using Marketing Automation
Once you have nailed your messaging and identified your various customer personas, you can leverage Marketing Automation tools such as Microsoft’s Dynamics 365 for Marketing to create personalized customer journeys for each stakeholder type.
These marketing tools help you to communicate at scale, track the engagement and pivot your messaging based on the buyer’s actions, interests and engagement. Organizations are leveraging these technologies to nurture stakeholders in a scalable, personalized manner. These technologies also enable companies to implement an omnichannel marketing engagement strategy that delivers the right message, at the right time, in the right way.
Digital enablement is a fundamental requirement for any organization selling in the digital era. Organizations investing in digital transformation are driving some incredible results. Are you looking to leverage your data better, enable your sellers and boost buyer engagement? We’d love to be a part of your digital transformation. Contact us at info@powerx365.com.