3 Customer Centric Strategies to Improve Sales

Customer Centric Strategies Can Improve Sales
High growth sales leaders at our sales management training programs are employing smart customer centric strategies to outperform their competition and stay relevant to target customers.  They do this by embedding a relentless focus on the customer in how they think, behave, and work. This allows them to deeply connect personally and professionally with their target customers and to better uncover known, unknown, and unmet needs.

In fact, recent research by McKinsey found that top sales performers are 27% better at solution selling.  To set the foundation to put your customers first, you must begin by:

• Creating a Clear Sales Strategy
  You first need to design a clear and compelling sales strategy that capitalizes on doing right by your customers in a way that makes sense for your marketplace and vision for success.
• Defining and Aligning Your Sales Culture
  Once your sales strategy is clear enough, your second step is to align your sales culture (how work gets done) with your customer centric sales strategy.  Do not underestimate this step.

  Our organizational alignment research found that the ability to align sales strategy and sales culture accounts for 71% of the difference between high and low performing sales teams teams.

• Aligning Your Sales Talent to Your Sales Strategy and Sales Culture
  Your final step is to design your people processes, practices, and systems in a way that enables every employee to deliver on a customer centric brand promise.

  That means ensuring that the way you attract, develop, engage and retain talent should be focused on their ability to help your clients to succeed.

Customer Centric Strategies Put the Client In the Center
As more services and products become commoditized, sales leaders are striving to differentiate and sell solutions through unique and compelling customer experiences. To further fuel the need to differentiate through customer centric strategies, technology continues to re-frame what is possible and raise client expectations.

According a a recent salesforce report:

• 89% of business buyers say they expect companies to understand their unique needs and expectations
• 66% of consumers say they’re likely to switch brands if they feel treated like a number, not an individual
• 82% of business buyers say personalized customer care influences loyalty

Three Customer Centric Strategies to Improve Sales
With customers expecting immediate, responsive, consistent and even predictive service, it is not enough for sales teams to satisfy customers with a targeted solution. Sellers need to keep working with clients to solidify their relationship, add value and deepen their loyalty.

Here are three ways you can use customer centric strategies to keep customers for the long-term and insulate them from your competitors’ advances.

1. Increase Your Understanding of Your Customer’s Business
   You won a new target client over once, but things change. Keep up on what the trends are in their industry and what marketplace changes may affect their business.

   Your job as a trusted advisor and partner is to be the outside expert they need to check in regularly on how they are doing both personally and professionally, warn of impending problems, and point out opportunities and trends.

   Set up mechanisms for keeping in close touch. And be sure you know exactly why they bought from you in the first place so you can replicate those feelings and help them to succeed again and again.

2. Flex To Your Customers’ Changing and Emerging Needs
   Don’t get complacent, lazy or smug. As you continue to learn about your customers and the key problems they face, your solutions may need to adjust. It may just require a bit of fine-tuning or a more dramatic shift.

   Having your customer’s well-being at the heart of what and why you sell should allow everyone to work together to ensure your solutions are still relevant and applicable to their shifting needs.

3. Help Your Customers to Help You
   Loyal customers are happy to tell their friends and family about superior value and service. Make it easy for them to pass along word of their satisfaction with your solution. How?

   The simplest ways are to ask for client referrals, craft client testimonials you can use with potential customers, and to invite customers to join you at a conference or similar gathering where they can tell their story to a relevant audience about the positive impact you had on their business.

The Bottom Line
Putting the customer first is an important first step in creating customer centric strategies that build long-lasting relationships with target customers. But the partnership journey continues, step-by-step, as you expand upon your success.  If you put the goals, problems and needs of your customers first (not closing the deal), you are starting from the right place.

To learn more about what it takes to design and implement customer centric strategies, download, The 6 Steps to Build a Customer Centric Strategy and Culture