While it is easy to think that they work in silos, both the customer success and sales teams have quite a few overlaps in their day-to-day activities. What binds them together is their ability to nurture relationships with their customers.
Read MoreThis past year, we have all been rubbed a little raw. Expectations have been changed and what’s “normal” continues to change. Who knows what else tomorrow will bring? As salespeople, we have needed to adapt to a new level of being personable, understanding, and authentic. For many of us, it will take us back to our dating days.
Read MoreWhen I first got started in Customer Success (CS), I was over a large US-based organization where we had roughly 60 Fortune 500 companies as customers. These customers represented a large recurring revenue stream for our organization, and it was imperative that we retained more than 95% of our revenue (ARR) and it was more important that we retained logos.
Read More2020 emerged as one of the most challenging years in recent years. With catastrophic health and economic challenges, the whole world looked for ways to respond and adapt.
Read MoreMany businesses choose to ignore small- and medium-sized businesses (SMBs), setting their sights on closing larger clients
Businesses will benefit better by targeting the SMB market which has a shorter sales cycle and less red tape
Striking connections with your SMB customers will be easier if you make way for personalization and a clear communication process
If you are selling to small- and medium-sized businesses (SMBs), you must make it an intentional part of your strategy, tailoring not just the prices but your entire approach.
SMB is a segment in its own right. Your SMB sales can only be successful if you remove barriers, understand the whys and hows of the SMB market, and adopt the right mindset to ensure success with SMB customers.
With almost 31 million small businesses in the U.S. alone, the SMB market represents a tremendous business opportunity for enterprises of all sizes.
Before we jump into effective strategies for successful SMB sales, let’s look at what the landscape is all about.
As mentioned earlier, SMB stands for small- and medium-sized business.
SMB sales refers to salespeople selling products or services to this market. SMBs usually have fewer than 500 employees.
SMBs also have shorter sales cycles and cost less for salespeople to close a deal.
Since SMBs often have very different needs and customer pain points, it requires SMB salespeople to use a unique SMB sales strategy to land clients, compared to the strategies involved in any big enterprise.
Many businesses choose to ignore SMBs, setting their sights on closing larger clients.
But, in comparison, SMBs have less red tape, resulting in shorter sales cycles. It is also easier to get in touch with key decision makers, entailing more success for your SMB sales strategy.
It is vital to keep in mind that SMBs don’t always remain an SMB.
An SMB today might grow into a multi-million dollar company in a few years. And this big enterprise will keep on using your product or service for years to come.
Let’s walk through some of the best sales techniques for SMB customers.
As you get down to fine tuning your SMB sales strategy, make sure to add early engagement as the first part of the process.
Interact with potential customers before you start pitching.
By making yourself available at the very start of the decision-making process and maintaining consistent contact, you will provide greater value throughout the process.
Additionally, you will be top-of-mind when the time comes for your SMB customers to make a purchase.
Qualifying leads help you to determine whether a lead fits into your ideal customer profile and will convert into a paying customer.
Lead qualification is critical to any segment that you are targeting, but more so for the SMB market. Keep the following points in mind when evaluating an SMB business:
Has the business been registered last week?
Has the SMB determined its business model yet?
How much funding does the SMB have?
Such questions will help you evaluate if you are zeroing down on a SMB that fits your business. Otherwise, you will be depleting your own resource pool in chasing the wrong client.
Regardless of what you are selling, it won’t be a good fit for everyone.
One you have zeroed down on your ideal customer type, you can make the process even more seamless by focusing on a smaller cohort.
For instance, let’s take restaurants as your target SMB customer. Rather than simply targeting restaurants of a certain size, target those that cater to a specific demographic.
The idea is to get as specific as possible. This is how you will get to know everything about your ideal SMB profile, enabling you to sell better and smarter.
When you are fighting to make a mark in the SMB market, it is easy to get caught up in the details. But an in-depth sales pitch isn’t what your SMB client wants to hear.
Don’t complicate your pitch.
In fact, a simple straightforward pitch, with touches of personalization will be more effective for making a sale.
Present your information in an easy-to-digest, bite-sized format. Cover the facets of your product or service that your SMB leads will care about.
SMBs require products and services that will be up and running in no time, with little or no effort on their part.
That is why you must make it clear that your solution will meet their needs without an extra investment of time or money to install and build the features.
Regardless of your target SMB, ensure that implementation is fast and easy.
When you emphasize your understanding of their need for a turnkey solution, you show that you value their time.
SMB customers tend to be risk-averse, for many of them are bootstrapped.
For SMBs, every dollar counts.
You can set your customers’ minds at ease with some easy steps listed below:
Offer a free trial of your solution
Provide a money-back guarantee
Make way for monthly payments rather than a yearly subscription
Feature testimonials and case studies on your website so they have proof of your product’s features
Long-term customer loyalty comes with a slew of benefits for your business.
In fact, repeat business can generate valuable referrals for you.
So, it is important for you to maintain and strengthen existing SMB partnerships.
This starts with treating your SMB customers as valued individuals. Personalize their experience with your sales team. Be patient and offer assistance at every stage of the sales process.
Whether it be pre-sale or post-sale, every engagement must be guided with the objective of providing stellar customer service and support.
To capture a meaningful and sustaining partnership, it is critical to lead with the objective of providing value for your SMB customers, and not just to create value for your business.
A successful SMB sales pitch will find a way to help clients achieve their dreams in a manner that is honest, transparent, and respectful.
Sales enablement is the process of supporting your organization’s sales team with the information and tools they need to be successful. While this is a fairly broad statement, it involves careful planning and coordination to ensure your company has a proper sales enablement program in place.
Read MoreProsthetic patients at the Hospital das Clinicas in São Paulo, Brazil, are receiving a new form of treatment. Each patient is fitted with an armband connected to a gamification platform. The platform, designed by Accenture, uses SAP Leonardo capabilities and has several virtual reality dashboards that entertain and encourage patients as they work with their prosthetic limbs. In addition to the dashboards providing improved detecting, measuring and analyzing capability, it also makes monotonous exercises fun and infinitely more engaging. Initial findings suggest that patients who use the gamified armbands have a greater acceptance of their situation, emerge from their sessions with higher self-esteem, and make much more progress during the course of their treatment.
Read MoreThese days, knowing your prospects is more crucial than ever. It's not just about understanding their interests; it's about deciphering their intentions. Buyer intent provides valuable insights into whether a prospect is merely curious or ready to invest in your product or service.
By analyzing the digital footprints left by your prospects, you can gain a deeper understanding of their purchasing journey. This knowledge allows you to tailor your approach, ensuring you engage them at the right time and with the right message. Let's dive into how you can uncover and interpret this data to enhance your sales strategy.
Establishing a proactive sales operations approach is necessary if you want to gain more business or cross-sell to existing clients. On the other hand, a reactive approach is haphazard and just doesn’t work out in the long run. Being proactive in your sales strategy entails planning, profiling targeted accounts, finalizing and executing account strategies, and creating a process to receive continuous feedback to improve performance. When done right, it leads to more sales revenue.
Read MoreThere is not a single business in the world that can say that they haven’t lost a customer. And every business employs a different approach to handling it.
While some look for new customers to equalize the loss, others put their focus on analyzing what went wrong and how to stop it from happening further.
This problem is called customer churn. Your churn rate denotes the number of customers who are leaving your product or service during a given time period.
A HubSpot report highlights that generating leads and enhancing customer engagement strategies are the top priorities for over 50% of companies today.
Organizations, irrespective of their sector, spend vast amounts of resources and energies to reduce churn because your churn highlights how happy your customers are with you.
Despite its importance, many organizations struggle in implementing successful user engagement strategies to reduce churn. So how do you reduce churn? This article deep dives into this very problem.
While an obvious step to reduce churn, it is also a crucial one. You must find out why your customers left. Talking to such customers and getting to know them is one way to go about it. It is also an excellent way to demonstrate that you care.
You should actively make use of all media channels such as phone, e-mail, website, live chat, and social media. Surveys can be a useful tactic too if customers don’t want to talk.
An important step in reducing customer churn is to actively engage with your customers. This is called relationship marketing wherein you take decisive steps in delighting your customers and showing them value in your product/service so they have a reason to keep coming back.
As a starting point, provide your customers with versatile content that deals with the key benefits of your product. It should include regular update announcements and news about special offers.
Simply put, when you engage proactively with your customers, you address their pain points, build trust, and brand preference which translates into a substantial increase in revenue streams.
Getting started with a new product can be overwhelming for your customers. And if they are not able to figure out how to navigate through, they will lose interest, adding to your overall customer churn.
Your customer engagement strategy here is to ease their transition by setting up an effective onboarding process or roadmap. Such a process will guide new customers through your products, their features, functions, and processes.
Such a strategy also gives you greater control over how you want to supplement the information to your customers. Remember that your goal is to empower your customers. So it is vital that you constantly monitor and iterate your onboarding process.
Give your customers a reason to stick around.
Offer them something special such as promo codes, discounts, and loyalty programs among others. These small steps can prove to be quite effective in reducing churn and showing your customers that you value them and their business.
A vital point to remember is the time in your customer’s lifecycle when you should offer these incentives. For instance, it can be at the end of your customer’s journey when you are not sure if they will go for a renewal. You can provide a discounted renewal rate to help them finalize their decision.
Many of the big companies made it big because of their focus on providing stellar customer service. It is an excellent way to prevent churn. Your service reps should be empowered to solve your customers’ queries in a timely manner.
An Oracle report states that incompetent staff and slow service are the top two reasons for customers leaving a company.
Enhance your customer service capabilities by upskilling your labor force or outsourcing your customer success operations.
You can employ customer success managers to ensure that your most valuable customers are taken care of.
Your managers will provide your customers with the right input to maximize their investment in your product.
For your customers, they become the main point of contact, paving the way for more personalized interaction.
A success manager will take care of the following points:
Identifying those customers who are planning to leave your product or service
Nurture the relationship and make them stay
Make way for stronger and persistent communication
There are two reasons why reducing customer churn should be at the top of your mind.
The first is the financial aspect.
According to Forrester, it costs 5 times more for companies to acquire new customers than it does to keep the existing ones. The second reason is that the more customers a business retains, the higher its revenue will be.
But it all boils down to analyzing the right reasons behind your churn rate and swiftly acting on them. However, do keep in mind that you won’t go from 10-15% to 1-2% within a week or even overnight.
Reducing your churn rates is a process that you need to improvise as you go along but it’s worth the time and effort invested.
Best of luck!
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