The document is a webinar presentation about rallying sales channels around today's customer. It discusses how customers now manage 85% of interactions without humans and expect more from B2B companies. The customer journey is now problem-specific rather than product-specific. The presentation emphasizes the importance of relevancy, accuracy, delivery, consistency and synergy between a company and its partners. It provides tips like empowering salespeople with knowledge and focusing on accurate and consistent customer experiences. In conclusion, the presentation encourages empowering channel teams with knowledge, focusing on delivery, and creating synergy between enterprises and partners.
2. Jen Spencer
Director of Sales & Marketing
jspencer@allbound.com
@jenspencer
Hey! It’s nice to meet you.
Matt Hensler
Director of Customer Success
mhensler@allbound.com
@matthensler
22. #NeverSellAlone
Don’t …
Communicate to you
customers the same way you
communicate to prospects.
Send highly promotional
messages that don’t account
for the recipients’ shift in status
from buyer to owner.
23. #NeverSellAlone
Do …
Evaluate the communications
you are sending your customers.
Are you just sharing ‘nice to
know’ information or is it ‘need
to know’ information?
24. #NeverSellAlone
Do …
Leverage the in-depth customer
understanding that customer
success teams possess in order
to enhance communications.
25. #NeverSellAlone
Do …
Ensure your customer marketing
continues to drive those owners
of your solutions back to the
product so that they can achieve
the desired outcome that drove
the original purchase.
27. You must work to avoid the friction that can be created
if synergy doesn’t exist.
#NeverSellAlone
28. #NeverSellAlone
Aligning content to the buyer’s
journey and creating customer
personas help partners create
more relevancy and
consistency of experience.
Aberdeen Group Study
29. #NeverSellAlone
Empowering quota-carriers with
the training, skills and especially
cloud-based content with which to
adapt their messaging, content
and collateral to their individual
territories and accounts.
Aberdeen Group Study
37. Jen Spencer
Director of Sales & Marketing | Allbound
jspencer@allbound.com
@jenspencer
Matt Hensler
Director of Customer Success| Allbound
mhensler@allbound.com
@matthensler
For information about Allbound, visit
www.allbound.com or call us at 480.685.5474
Notas do Editor
JEN
Thanks for joining Allbound for our webinar, “Rallying Your Sales Channel Around Today’s Customer.” We’re excited to share some great content with you over the next 30 minutes, but first let’s take care of some quick housekeeping. We are recording this webinar, so if you need to step away, or during the webinar you think of a friend or colleague who might also enjoy this content, you’ll have a recording delivered right to your inbox tomorrow.
Our marketing team will also be live tweeting throughout the webinar, so you can contribute to the conversation by following @goallbound on Twitter.
JEN and MATT
JEN
When we think about the customer experience and how your company can be aligning your sales ecosystem – including those partner resellers, distributors and agents – with the new customer experience, we break it down into 5 categories: Relevancy, Accuracy, Delivery, Consistency, and Synergy.
Also, as time allows, we’ll close with Q&A, so jot those questions down, or plug them right into the question portal of your control panel. As time allows, we’ll tackle as many as we can live during the session, and we’ll be sure to answer each and every question directly should we hit our 30 minute mark.
JEN
Research firm Gartner predicts that by 2020, customers will manage 85% of their interaction with the enterprise without interacting with a human.
Now, if you’ve built your business by hiring as many sales people to make as many cold calls as possible, this is a very scary statistic.
JEN
Moreover, if like most enterprises you’ve grown your business by onboarding a large team of value added resellers, distributors, brokers or agents who are also relying on the old-school “tried and true” approach of throwing as many bodies as possible into a sales territory, then you must be downright frightened.
JEN
What we’ve discovered is today’s B2B customer expects more.
She’s done her research. She’s identified her problem, considered some options for a solution, and is now shopping for her preferred vendor (that’s you). And, when she chooses to interact with your company, over half the time she’s unfulfilled.
JEN
Today, our plan is to take you along the new customer journey (which, does not end at point of purchase), and share how to empower your channel teams with the knowledge they need to best meet the needs of today’s customers.
JEN
Brett Adamson, co-author of The Challenger Sale, and The Challenger Customer, noted that “Our biggest competitors are our customers."
If you’re not familiar with The Challenger Sale, this book dives into what top-performing reps are doing that their average performing colleagues are not, and this is largely focused on the skills, behaviors, knowledge, and attitudes of sales reps.
In The Challenger Customer, the authors, which include Brent Adamson, recognize that today, being a Challenger Seller isn't enough. Your success or failure also depends on WHO you challenge. And, in the book the authors reveal that there’s actually a very specific type of customer stakeholder that has the credibility, the persuasive skill, and the will to effectively challenge his or her colleagues to pursue anything more ambitious than the status quo. And that person – that customer stakeholder – is today’s ideal B2B prospect.
JEN
Diving into the behaviors of ideal B2B prospects, the Corporate Executive Board reported that “B2B buyers are learning on their own and delaying their contact with suppliers until late in the purchase.” Now, every year the CEB equips over 20,000 senior leaders from more than 10,000 organizations across 110 countries … so they definitely have a unique view into what matters—and what in today’s business environment.
JEN
Let’s look at The Customer Journey in the past …
Attention: Salespeople introduce prospects to products
Interest: Salespeople introduce product-specific information to prospects
Desire: Salespeople convince prospects they wanted to needed a product
Action: Salespeople attempt to close prospects
JEN
Today: Problem-specific, not product-specific & buyer-driven, not rep-driven
Awareness: Buyers seek resources to solve a problem. Salespeople are not heavily involved.
Consideration: Buyers begin to define what a solution could look like. Salespeople provide advice and work with buyers to create a highly customized action plan unique to their situation. This is what Google refers to as an “I Want to Know” micro-moment.
It’s important that you deliver the right training, sales tools and marketing materials to your partners, preparing them to deliver a highly-tailored set of information to the buyer in this critical moment of need.
Decision: Buyers evaluate different products. Salespeople educate buyers on the specifics of their product, explain competitive benefits and help evaluate whether their product is the best mutual fit. Being your brand’s presence “on the ground,” your partners own the relationships that create and foster trust with customers and prospects who use your solutions. Your role is to augment their capabilities, building up their local profile through proper training, certification and thought leadership.
The Customer Journey Does Not End With A Sale: There is a loyalty loop.
In today’s age when every product has hordes of competitors, this loyalty loop is a more accurate picture of how the customer reevaluates their decision to buy again and again. Suppliers and resellers can generate additional value through installation, onboarding and support services that build brand loyalty.
MATT
According to IDC, nearly 57% of B2B prospects feel that their sales teams are not prepared for their very first meeting.
MATT
Customers have too much at stake to be mis-informed or to spend time with people who can't meet their information requests.
Plus, because of all the information that is available to customers, if they feel they are not getting accurate info, trust wanes and the rep loses credibility.
MATT
And sellers are already fighting and uphill battle…
Millennials, the post-Generation-X cohort who are now a powerful consumer force, rank trust and authenticity high on the list of scrutinized factors when making brand choices, and are cynical about marketing.
A study spanning 12 global markets conducted by Cohn & Wolfe revealed a statistical preference for honest communication from companies (91 percent) over product or service desirability (60 percent).
MATT
Millennials are not the only skeptical group: a 2014 Gallup survey of American adults showed that only 10 percent of respondents felt that advertising ethics were high. It’s no longer good enough to have the catchiest slogan or best advertising strategy without trustworthiness as part of the package.
MATT
Customers today perform more due diligence than ever. They are personally invested in the solutions they buy on behalf of their company. If you've sold them on how great your company and product is, you can't let them down once the deal is closed.
MATT
Deliver your product in a way that lives up to the promotion your customers encountered pre-sales.
MATT
Customer communications need to be valuable, authentic experiences — same as pre-sales.
MATT
Consistency of experience builds trust and eventually loyalty. Then loyalty leads to renewal or repeat purchase, recommendations and accuracy.
Customer communications need to be valuable, authentic experiences — same as pre-sales.
.
JEN
From marketing, to sales to delivery and beyond, consistency is critical across the entire customer experience.
JEN
Don’t Communicate to you customers the same way you communicate to prospects. Think about authentic communication. If you met a customer for dinner, how would you behave? What types of questions would you ask? Most likely, they’re not going to be the same types of questions you would ask a prospect.
And Don’t Send highly promotional messages that don’t account for the recipients’ shift in status from buyer to owner. Consider how you feel when you see an advertisement on TV from your cable or your wireless provider – and they’re offering a great deal for the exact same service you current buy – only for the fresh new customer, it costs less and yet seems to offer so much more value.
JEN
Evaluate the communications you are sending your customers. Think about the actual person on the other end of the communication. Let’s say you sell software. Is your message for the person who administers the software? The manager who supervises the individuals using the software? Taking the time to consider and segment your audience, even beyond identifying them as customers of your product or solution, will help ensure your communications are not just received, but also consumed and understood.
Also, ask yourself, are you just sharing ‘nice to know’ information or is it ‘need to know’ information? Consider how many emails and phone calls you get on a daily basis. Now imagine what your customer’s inbox looks like. There’s a delicate balance between under-sharing and oversharing, and what we recommend is asking if this is truly “need to know” information. Otherwise, if you’re constantly sharing “nice to know” messages, you might dilute your ability to get critical messages to your customers.
JEN
Another do:
Leverage the in-depth customer understanding that customer success teams possess in order to enhance communications. Typically, customer communications are going to live within your marketing department, because they have the tools and resources to disseminate corporate communications. And that make sense. But it’s important that sales and marketing and customer success are all collaborating with each other, because ultimately it’s the customer success professionals who have the in-depth knowledge on customer pain points.
JEN
Finally, do ensure your customer marketing continues to drive those owners of your solutions back to the product so that they can achieve the desired outcome that drove the original purchase. In today’s subscription, as-a-service economy, it’s easier than ever for your customers to switch products and providers. Just because you sold them once doesn’t mean they’re a customer for life. So taking some of that inbound marketing, content marketing methodology that educates prospects can be key in communicating with customers. Ensure they too have access to the resources that will make them better users of your product.
MATT
MATT
Having a partner ecosystem can mean great growth for your business, but you need to work to avoid the friction that can be created if that synergy doesn't exist.
MATT
Aligning content to the buyer’s journey and creating customer personas help partners create more relevancy and consistency of experience. In fact, best-in-class companies have up to 30% higher competency at doing this than other organizations.
MATT
Top-performing firms empower quota-carriers with the training, skills and especially portal-based content with which to customize their messaging and to adapt their collateral, and content to their individual territories and accounts.
MATT
For businesses with indirect sales channels, portal users reduce contract/proposal errors at over 3x the rate of non-adopters.
Orders and transactions need to be accurate so customers get what they asked for/need.
MATT
Users of sales enablement portals/platforms contribute to higher overall customer renewal rates
Now we’d like to open the webinar up to questions from our attendees. If you have a question, please go ahead and enter it in the question field of the webinar control panel.
If you have a large channel of resellers, how do you provide them with authentic content and avoid having them run into each other in the market?
Some partners are interested in having information about certain products or features that aren’t necessary for others. How do you avoid dividing up relevant information without it being someone’s full time job?
JEN
When you empower your channel teams with the knowledge they need to best meet the needs of today’s customers, your channel will be aligned with today’s customer journey.
JEN
Focusing on accurate and consistent delivery throughout your channel will ensure customers travel through your company’s loyalty loop.
JEN
Creating synergy between your enterprise and your channel partners will help eliminate obstacles.
Now we’d like to open the webinar up to questions from our attendees. If you have a question, please go ahead and enter it in the question field of the webinar control panel.
If you have a large channel of resellers, how do you provide them with authentic content and avoid having them run into each other in the market?
Some partners are interested in having information about certain products or features that aren’t necessary for others. How do you avoid dividing up relevant information without it being someone’s full time job?