The Power of Personalization in Sales Management: How to Build Stronger Relationships with Customers

Personalization in sales is the new grail uncovering the secrets of better brand loyalty, improved conversions, and higher revenues. If the brand doesn’t provide excellent personalization, most customers may stop purchasing from it.

Individuals expect businesses to provide them with an experience tailored to their needs, and in this article, we will discuss how to implement such sales strategies effectively.

 

Understanding the Benefits of Personalization in Sales Management 

According to recent McKinsey research, 71% of consumers expect a brand to address their pain points via personalization. Customers, both individual and organization, will likely switch to a company that offers a better experience based on a personal approach.

Individualized purchasing experience will be followed by an increased chance of recommending, referring to a brand, and later repurchasing from a company.

 

 

Source: McKinsey&Company

 

Personalization in sales management has proven to be a promising tool for boosting customer outcomes. Customers expect special treatment – they want to feel valued. In other words, they seek unique solutions for their unique challenges.

Considerate interactions like relevant product recommendations, how-to videos, targeted promotions, or post-purchase inquiries all help to build lasting and intimate relationships with a brand.

 

That is why companies focus on improving personalized customer experience to drive long-term benefits. Here are a few top advantages a business may enjoy from personalization in sales management:

 

Advantages of Personalization in Sales Management

 

Personalization in sales leads to improved brand loyalty and repeat purchases

Customers tend to feel more loyal to a brand if the company considers their needs and preferences. Clients like to celebrate their milestones with a brand or enjoy engagement based on their previous experience with a business.

As a result, such personalized relationships with customers lead to the increased likeliness of repeat purchases.

 

 

It Helps a Sales Team to Shorten a Sales Cycle and Bring more Revenue

Another undoubting benefit of personalization in sales is improved conversion. Individual approach speeds up decision-making and drives a customer through a sales cycle faster.

Moving your leads toward a purchase is more accessible, as personalization increases the brand’s trust and authority. All this leads to more significant income for the business.

 

For instance, transparent ads based on previous experience alone may accelerate the revenue of a product by 38%, according to Harvard Business Review.

 

Excel Among Your Competitors with a Personalized Approach

Finally, customers keep turning down the brands that fail to meet their expectations towards personalized experience.

Lack of customized communication results in clients being frustrated with a brand. So if they don’t find what they anticipate, they will likely turn to another brand that cares about the customers on a personal level.

 

You’ll need to grow customer intimacy to stand out from the crowd. Focusing on personalized interactions is vital if you expect to beat your competitors. Otherwise, your business may end up overboard.

 

 

Identifying Customer Needs and Preferences 

Seventy-four percent of customers experience frustration when dealing with web content that is not personalized. These days a business needs to get a ‘360-degree customer view’ to meet their needs and expectations.

The better you know your customer, the easier it is to predict their purchasing behaviors. 

 

The basic data types needed for B2C business include name, email, phone number, location, age, gender, and profession.

The basic data types needed for B2B business include the contact employee’s name, email and phone number, position, company name, field, and company revenue.

 

However, this is not enough for advanced personalization strategies. A business can see impressive results by examining real-time insight and micro-moment interactions.

Marketing strategies today are about light-speed relevance. For example, a customer gets off a plane. This moment is a unique opportunity for local hotels, restaurants, or shops to send a targeted message, notification, or pop-up on Facebook offering their service.

 

If you want to personalize the customer experience on a new level, you will need the following:

• personal data (name, phone, email, demographics, etc.)
• engagement data (open, click, conversion rates, abandonment rate, customer lifetime value (CLTV), recurring revenue, response time, etc.)
• behavioral data (web views, sign-ups, likes, adding an item to a shopping cart, downloading an app/ebook/tool, etc.)
• sentiment data (customer feedback in reviews and surveys via Net Promoter Score question, comments on social media, etc.)

 

Despite understanding the utmost importance of data-driven personalization in sales, sales managers may get overwhelmed with where to start and how to analyze customer data effectively.

 

Working Tips to Get Started

 

Identify your goals 

What are your priorities? Do you need to improve customer retention, increase repeat purchases, or maybe you’re interested in boosting brand affinity?

 

Define the metrics you need 

Say, you want to lower the rate of incomplete orders. So it would be great for you to monitor the abandonment rate to see why customers leave your website without finishing their purchase.

 

Analyze your data and automate the process

It’s vital to automate data collection. This way, you’ll have more time to examine the insights behind it. For instance, examining and viewing data in just one tool like Tableau may not be enough.

For advanced analytics, you may want to export data from Tableau as a PDF file or PPT and then combine it with other analytics tools. Better analytics means more robust sales strategies.

 

Creating Personalized Sales and Marketing Strategies 

Personalized sales and marketing strategies create ample opportunity to win over the hearts and minds of your audience.

Personalization in sales and marketing is vital to fostering meaningful customer relationships that will pay off through lower acquisition costs, churn rate, and revenues.

 

We have already discussed the basics of personalization – data collection of customers’ needs and preferences. Now the question is how to employ these data with intelligent strategies. Here are a few tips that have proven to work:

 

 

Sending personalized emails

Start using your customer’s first name if you haven’t done it yet. As part of marketing strategies, such a tiny detail can improve open rates by 26%.

However, a more advanced approach would be using the customer’s previous experience with your company and offering product/service recommendations customized to the persona’s needs and interests.

 

Moreover, getting creative and using storytelling in email marketing is effective. Telling a story about your product and how it helped other customers can help you connect with your audience on a deeper personal level.

 

Making use of a live chat 

The power of live chats was underestimated for a long time. However, more than half of customers are likelier to become loyal to a brand and purchase from it again if there is a live chat.

This way, you can better understand your prospects’ needs, offer them a friendlier experience, and deliver better solutions to their problems.

 

Personalizing follow-ups

A black horse among sales strategies is follow-up tactics. Did you know that effective follow up can be the key to getting the sale, securing an offer, or sealing a deal?

With enhanced data like (web pages visited, product demos requested, email campaigns a customer engaged with, etc.) you can tailor personalized follow-up messages to increase response rates and close the deal more straightforwardly. 

 

Building Stronger Relationships with Customers

We entered a new era where businesses are trying their best to foster strong relationships with their customers and boost customer loyalty. Most buyers prefer personalized experiences, and many don’t have any concerns about retailers storing their purchase history and preferences.

Moreover, 67% of customers believe it’s crucial for a brand to automatically modify the content to provide them with a real-time personalized experience.

 

Personalization in sales management shows that a brand cares about a particular customer’s unique needs and preferences.

It’s human nature to seek an understanding of one’s problems, and personalizing your sales strategies will help you create this deep and lasting connection with your audience.

 

So say, a company sells contact lenses. Every month their customers need to repurchase this product. With a simple trick of a CRM or marketing automation tool, you can send a tailored email to your customers, reminding them about the need to change their contacts.

This way, it’s not regarded as one of the pushy marketing strategies but as a brand taking care of its customers.

 

Let’s have a look at another example. A company sells a product (generator, gas water heater, solar inverter, etc.) or a software/tool (cloud-based management software, data analytics tools, email marketing app, etc.) that needs profound knowledge of how to use it. 

 

Such products require a perfect understanding of customers’ pain points and personalized support. For this reason, sending your customers free how-to-guide, explainer videos, or newsletters with valuable industry insights dealing with customers’ problems would be a great idea. You can customize social media ads tailored to the needs of your audience.

 

Frankly speaking, for personalization in sales sky’s the limit, as you can:

• create various versions of landing pages adjusting to specific customers’ needs
• send personalized notifications
• offer individual discounts
• etc.

 

 

Conclusion 

Personalizing your sales strategies may often seem daunting at first, as it is about building meaningful relationships with your customers. It is a lasting journey involving continuous work, listening, adjusting, and improving.

However, the benefits of personalization are worth all the effort since nothing pays off better than happy customers.