It seems pretty obvious, but not everyone realizes it. If the customer purchase journey doesn’t include a direct and proper relationship with sales, things won’t work out very well.
In this post, we’re going to address several factors that should help any professional who wants to model their sales processes to be the most effective and in the process also obtain great results for their company.
Also see another post from our blog related to this subject: Retain Customers Through End to End Customer Experience
How to model sales processes in tune with the customer purchase journey
There are several stages in the purchasing decision process as well as, every customer purchase journey, starting from the moment they discover and are attracted by an offer, through to the acquisition of a product or service.
And if during these customer conversion persuasion steps, some stage of your sales process is of no use to the customer, it’s a waste of time and therefore of sales productivity.
It’s important to note that this kind of failed process, besides increasing costs with unnecessary activities, can end any sales conversion optimization attempt.
To better understand this theme, let’s look at one of the many ways we divide the customer purchase journey. It includes 8 steps, as follows:
- Conscious That there’s a problem to be solved
- Recognition That there must be a solution
- Urgency To resolve it soon
- Education Of the problem to understand it better
- Researching providers For a solution to the problem
- Comparison Among the solutions offered in the market
- Decision To buy from one of them
- Implementation Of the solution
For each of these steps, your sales process should predict how to interact with customers, to get them moving on their journey.
Let’s look at some common sales practices in the market and what care your process should take if you want to use them in your business.
Cold calling
Cold calling is a sales tactic various companies often use in the early stages of the customer purchase journey.
This is a very difficult activity to implement because they make these calls to people who have not requested them. This is a person who the seller believes may have an interest in the product or service, based on a general profile of companies (or people) that usually want them.
We aren’t saying that cold calling will always be a mistake in organizations. What you need to understand is that without a very well-defined profile and rigidly selected contact base, this stage of your sales process will certainly not fit into the journey of the majority of the customers contacted.
In fact, this technique only works when talking to customers who are already in the final stages of the journey.
Using the internet
When a customer uses the internet to find a solution to their problems, he or she is at least in the “education” phase of the problem in his or her customer purchase journey and is therefore a much more qualified lead.
The idea at this point is not to disclose your product or service itself and its features on your website. One marketing strategy widely used to attract customers is so-called content marketing.
Basically, your site should contain a blog where various issues related to the solution that your company offers are treated in a relevant way. Also, your blog should deal with topics that the analytical research tools on the internet indicate to be the most sought after by your customer profile.
When they find content on the internet that will educate them about the problem (a stage of the customer purchase journey), they get to know your company, products or services.
A tactic used to capture contacts is to offer more in-depth material on the subject in these posts. For example, a video or an e-book, in exchange for the client’s email or phone. This builds your company a much more qualified base for creating links or sending marketing emails.
Customer service
Imagine that your customer is in the comparison phase and contacts your company to get more information about your solution.
At this point, the vast majority of companies make a serious mistake:
They train their sales force to sell at any cost, pushing offers on interested parties.
The problem is that at this point in the customer purchase journey, they still don’t know if this service or product is the best for them. And so this kind of attitude can drive shoppers away.
The right attitude, which gets the best results, is to find out exactly what the customers’ problem is. Then try to demonstrate to them every value of your solution and the benefits that they can enjoy with it.
Don’t talk about prices if they don’t ask. And you should alert the customer that your product or service will not solve their problem, if applicable. Yes, you must give up the sale if it doesn’t meet the customer’s needs.
Access this post from our blog and check out a ready to use sales process workflow, or edit it as you like for the particularities of your company: Sales process flowchart: Increase your sales!
As you’ve just seen, using Sales Process Optimization based on the customer purchase journey in your business is critical.
Use HEFLO, business process modeling and automation software, and optimize your sales processes with much more agility.
To learn more about business process modeling and automation, read free e-book on the subject: The BPM Cookbook Guide, and check out our quick start guide video, here: