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19th May 2022

How To Create Customer-Centric Strategies with Digital Selling?

The urge of going digital has become a necessity for businesses today. It would not be wrong to say that any business still relying on traditional methods is futile, eventually, they will lose out on their competition. Digital transformation is the driving force behind disruption in the business ecosystems. According to a survey of over 4000 C-Level executives globally, 89% stressed the need for a more agile and efficient IT infrastructure for their businesses amid Covid-19. The odds being in digitization’s favor in such a huge number is a testament to the significance of digitalization in today’s highly competitive business landscape. Of course, marketing being one of the fundamental business functions, went digital and gave birth to a lucrative digital selling phenomenon. 

 

Digital selling has revolutionized the way businesses engage with their potential prospects. The goal of digital selling is to garner lasting relationships with the prospects online leading to a sales conversion.  The dependence of sales and marketing teams can be acknowledged with the fact that 73% of salespeople employ digital sales technologies to conclude their deals. 

Among the competencies that benefit the most from digital selling is Sales. Sales teams can employ digital selling tools and techniques such as sales accelerators, conversation intelligence, as well as predictive scoring that can help the sales teams to boost their productivity as well as reduce cost at a greater volume. 

Digital transformation has brought an ease for the companies to market themselves to greater number of masses, but it can also be detrimental if not done properly. The mere abundance of digital selling tools is not sufficient for businesses to thrive and strengthen their customer relationships, it requires skills and techniques to create the right blend, which will have a lasting impact upon your customer’s buying behavior and subsequently, convert them into long-term customers. 

Businesses need to understand the vitality of digital selling strategies focusing entirely on the customer’s preferences, only then the desired impact can be achieved. This blog is all about teaching you the ways you can create high-yielding customer centric strategies with the help of digital selling tools.

New Customer Mandate

 

The modern-day consumers are well-informed and why would they not be? An average internet user spends 6 hours on digital platforms every day. They are exposed to a plethora of information every day; hence, they have access to real-time information every time everywhere. Their smartphones act as a complete data pack with all the information kept in a compact gadget. The instant and endless access of information enables the users to secure the best deal of a product of their choice in a short time. 

Moreover, there is no such thing as overnight success on digital platforms for businesses at least. However, they can fall overnight. It is because the internet has empowered the users. A smartphone in a prospect’s hand holds your business’ fate. A single bad review and it can jeopardize your brand image. Users today focus on the minutest of aspects when using a particular product or service and their experience can either result in the success or demise of a business. This is one of the reasons that businesses must be careful and steady while building brand image among digital audiences.  

One more thing, understanding the customer is critical, the customers make wishes. Some businesses understand those wishes while some fail to do so. It is due to the convenience-oriented buying behavior of a customer. The customers quickly shift to the brands providing sustainable value, economical pricing, and accessibility. This is where new entrants steal a large market share and established businesses gradually fall prey to marginalization. 

The solution? Of course, it’s digitalization. The digital technologies tailored to business needs provide a quick fix to above mentioned issues faced by enterprises. With the right business applications and strategies, businesses can push back the boundaries of possibilities while they champion digital transformation with fervor. Keeping this in view, the predilection of businesses towards digital transformation can be assessed by the fact that the corporate IT spending is expected to reach $4.4 trillion by 2023. 

Businesses can deploy digital technologies built solely to address and entertain the customers, to ensure they accurately assess the constantly changing demands of their customers and convert customer’s thoughts into reality. This is possible when businesses connect with customers as partners, not accounts. 

The best way to execute such a meticulous plan is through digital technologies and you as business entity will find the result you long for – long-term customer relationships. Let’s move towards a more practical implication of digital selling and how to create strategic revolving around it. 

How Can Digital Solutions Improve Customer Experience?

In the era of digitalization, the introduction of digital business applications has transformed the customer management paradigm for organizations. 65% of professionals believe that digital experiences of a firm’s customers hold great significance. It’s not just one or two departments concerned or connected to customers anymore. Every department of the organization has to be in contact with the customer to enhance the overall customer experience. The businesses ought to break their departmental silos to enrich their customer experiences. For instance, a customer who approaches a business, does not want to repeat their grievance to every employee again and again at different channels. With every channel, there is some sort of a layer that keeps the customer from getting to the right person or getting their issue resolved instantly. 

 

A synergized functional structure of an organization provides a unified channel for the customer to interact with additional barriers or hindrances that keep them from getting in touch with the right individual with a solution to their query. Today, various departments are managing different responsibilities to become more agile and hyperactive towards customer management. For instance, if the customer approached the support department, the sales team must be aware of it to assess the reason behind the customer’s query and then look for an opportunity to upsell. 

Conservative organizational cultures might not endorse cross-departmental alignment, but if an organization wants to go beyond the horizon and get the most out of it, they need to remove boundaries and encourage such a culture that depicts more unified internal and external communication structures, this will result in a better customer experience. 

Creating Client-Centric Strategies with Digital Selling

With the advent of digital shopping and communication channels, the customer controls the market more than ever. Businesses must be careful in how they nurture and build strong relationships with today’s finicky and picky customers, and this responsibility is put upon the sales personnel. We have some tips for the sales personnel to garner better bonds with customers via digital selling.

  • Approach everything from customer’s point of view

It’s undeniable that any business that puts their customer at the heart of everything, thrives. Their customer lifetime automatically increases due to the value they deliver to their customer base. The trick is to perceive your offerings like your customer would, assess the market dynamics like you think your customer would, and understand what your customer needs right now so that you can bridge that gap.

You can achieve the afore-mentioned objectives easily upon activating digital selling. The digital technologies such as Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales empowers the sales teams to cultivate end-to-end digital buying experiences through various stages of customer’s journey. This way, the customers are given the freedom to buy whatever they want and through whatever the mode of buying they prefer, be it remote/digital or even hybrid. 

To do afore-mentioned, businesses can optimize on real-time data insights on customer behavior and their buying decisions to customize your offerings and value. Of course, agility is a must because the buying decisions of customers today change faster than ever. So, in such times, it is imperative for organizations to be able to adapt to the changes and perform accordingly.  

  • Devise a customer-centric vision

Here, we will pretty much talk about the same thing as we did in the previous point, but the focus here is on the vision. An organization that places customers at the core of its business gets more positive experiences and hence, long-term relationships without extra efforts of customer relationship management. 

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems help you maintain the customer-centricity vision by combining all the core functions related to your sales, marketing and customer support to enhance the customer experience. The data-insights give you a holistic view of your clientele. Not only this, but the CRMs automate the whole sales force processes by leveraging digital selling to engineer stronger and deeper relationships with customers, transition to proactivity and respond to dynamic market trends, which eventually results in higher cost efficiency and productivity levels. 

  • Customer data democratization

While you collect your customer database, the next step is to centralize its access and that is done through data democratization. The customer data democratization is a digital way of making information accessible to the end users. This process enables even a layman to classify, segment, and analyze data with no help, this is how digitization is bringing convenience to businesses and their customers. 

The centralized data provides real-time insights to businesses to make well informed decisions. Such insights can be gained through CRM databases which provide a unified view to the businesses to better facilitate their customers and enhance their experiences.

  • Ruthless simplification

One of the most important factors in creating an exceptional customer experience is simplification. This convenience factor is what could be the driving force behind your customer’s long-term relationship with your brand. While building a simple product, build a simpler customer journey. What’s meant here is that the value or the simplicity being rendered to the customers should be reflected in every aspect. 

The CRMs help the sales teams to cut-through the intricate to-do lists and multi-channel involvement with varying user experiences. With the inclusion of Artificial Intelligence (AI), the sales teams are able to close deals faster as AI helps them to prioritize their tasks and expand their reach to potential customers. 

Be it design, cost, theme, layout, or anything else, the value being delivered by your business should be clear and visible to the customer. Lastly, when it comes to interaction and engagement, the user-experience of your CRM interfaces should be simplified to the core. Subsequently, the engagement rates and higher productivity will follow.

Not only this, but customer experiences can also be enhanced through looking at a complete picture, the market, and your competitors. To be on top, you should stick to market research like glue and monitor the competition’s price factors, customer engagement and behavioral tactics as well as metrics. Most importantly, be vigilant of the market threats and risks which may hamper your growth and tackle them to outsmart your competitors. As a result, you will capture a larger market share and eventually, make greater efforts to retain that share by applying the above-discussed strategies.

Conclusion

Digital transformation can enable customer-centric organizations to be more agile and collaborative by offering more personalized ways of engaging with the customers, encouraging innovation among the employees, productivity boosting methods, and real-time data, all of which assists a business to grow and offer better chances to businesses to thrive.