The First Sale is Only the Beginning
When it comes to customer onboarding, it doesn’t matter who the customer (clients, employees, shoppers) is, you only have one opportunity to make a first impression. Top brands like Salesforce, Travel Protection, and Berkshire Hathaway are delighting customers through the onboarding process.
What they are doing isn’t complicated at all. Let me show you how to tap into these uncommon CRM best practices and take your client onboarding to a new level.
Deliver cross-selling recommendations to employees
Client onboarding is the lifeblood of your business. You can’t do without it. According to Team Support, over 60% of support professionals said that client onboarding is in place in their companies.
In a company, everybody is a salesperson. Because everybody is interacting with the customer whether directly or indirectly. Salespeople are people who love to sell. But being blind to the needs of a customer can be the obstacle to a successful sales messaging.
Through the use of a CRM, a salesperson can get vital information about a customer and cross-sell other products to them. This makes your customers satisfied because you’re meeting their needs at the appropriate time.
Amazon is a company that’s good at cross-selling customers who are already in a purchasing mindset. Jeff Bezos once revealed that Amazon made 35% of its sales through cross-sells. For a customer who orders a digital camera, for example, Amazon recommends a memory card and a camera case that goes with it.
In your company, cross-selling will be more effective if the sales department and customer service department are well-informed about the customer.
Unfortunately, if your salespeople are great but your customer support is bad, there will be a bottleneck in the sales process.
Bad customer support could end up undoing the great work your sales agents have done. However, with the use of CRM, customer support and other departments can have access to information about a customer, learn how to treat customers like kings that they are, and inspire them to take the right action.
They can have the knowledge of the usage pattern of customers and recommend products that will be suitable for them.
For example, you can check your contact list on AgileCRM, choose a lead, study their behavior from the time they signed up to your business till date, and use that insight to cross-sell complementary products or services and nurture leads to convert them into customers.
One other way cross-selling can be effective is by asking customers what they want. Through their feedback, you can add more information to each user’s account, cross-sell them, and onboard new clients as well.
Here’s Alex Turnbull, founder of Groove asking a simple question via a welcome email to prospects who signed up.
When and how you ask people questions may be different because your own business model and goals are unique. The bottom line is to give users the opportunity to speak their minds about what they want from your brand.
You may not recommend a product right away (especially when you don’t have a suitable product), but the information, data, and insights from potential customers can help you make smart decisions in the future.
Provide diversified access
Your client’s team have different members who are probably concerned with different parts of your service. When trying to tie a client down, it is important to provide diversified access to different team members. Especially when you’re marketing to a B2B company that has all the structures in place.
For instance, the salespeople in your client’s team would appreciate your service more if they have access to contacts and leads features. Meanwhile, the social marketers will be more concerned with the part of your service that shows social engagement.
No, they don’t have to edit or modify the information, you could simply share it as a read-only link to folders, subfolders, and files, just the same way Dropbox allows users to give access permission to other team members.
Most CRM software out there allows you to add team members to your marketing campaign. If you can, provide complete access to your client’s team members that will assist them in achieving the goals of using your service.
When you do this, you’re leaving a strong impression on all team members that your company is worth doing business with, and this will motivate the client to make quick decisions in your own favor.
If every member of your client’s team finds your service useful, it simply means you have a satisfied client.
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Get more conversions out of free trials
For most small businesses that rely on automation, generating sales is the most important goal of the sales process. When they offer free trials for products, they only care about the number of people who make the purchase. They are fascinated with the analytics.
Inasmuch as this is good, looking at the numbers will not do you any good. In fact, if you have been following this strategy, then you have been missing out on many opportunities that will actually result in sales.
According to Intercom, 40-60% of users who sign up for a free trial of software will use it once and never come back again. Which means you still have a lot of work to do even though you have signed up thousands of new users through a free trial.
A customer taking a trial could be grouped based on their intent. A customer may just be using your product on trial without any plan to purchase after the trial. Some users have plans to pay for your product after the trial while others want to see if your product or service is really beneficial before they pay for it.
The last two have the biggest potential to be customers. For someone who wants to buy your product, you want to make sure they don’t change their mind after the trial period. And you also want to prove how beneficial your product is to a skeptical user.
You want to show them how their lives can become easier and more effective if they continue to use your product after the trial period.
The best way to exploit the free trial period is to use a CRM system to track how users interact with your product. For instance, if a user visits the video tutorial session or FAQs page regularly, could it be that they have difficulties with your product? You should seek ways to interact with such users to make your product easier to use.
With a robust CRM software, you can have an early warning of a user who will likely stop using your product after the free trial. But during the trial, there is still a chance to turn that around.
Even when you’re happy with the usage pattern of a potential customer, you can still increase satisfaction before they pay for your product. With a successful client-onboarding, you can reduce clients’ churn rate and double revenue.
Stride (now ProsperWorks) sends handwritten notes to users who signed up for a free trial on their platform.
And who says a happy customer has to wait until the end of the free trial to pay for your services? You can offer them the deal now while they’re still happy and turn them into a paying customer — through the use of a customer relationship management software.
Don’t sell features, sell success stories
It is good that you explain the core features of your product on your sales page. But you must consider that your customers are on that page because they want to solve a problem or meet a need. And even if they don’t have the full picture of their problems, your sales page must be able to show them how severe their problem is.
Of course, you don’t want to make them feel bad about themselves. This is to tell them how your product can eliminate all their worries. Now, the many features of your product may be a source of joy to your production team as they go through the numbers and bullets.
The function of your sales page is not to impress your production team. Your sales page should aim to impress your customers.
If you stop at listing the features of your product, you might piss off your customers. This is not good for anybody. Especially your business. If you can show your customers how your product will solve their problems, and if you can convince them enough about this, you will win their hearts.
Is there a better way of convincing your customers than telling them how other customers have used your product to solve the same problems they are battling with? Probably not.
When you back your products with success stories, you’re telling your potential customers that they’re not buying “chance.” They’re buying a proven solution.
According to research, 92% of consumers read online reviews and testimonials when considering a purchase online. Success stories are a vital part of your sales page because it is an indirect recommendation for your product.
For instance, when 161 Driving Academy replaced sticky hero images with the image of a real person driving, they increased conversions by 161%.
When customers are in the consideration stage of your sales funnel, you have to give them a good enough reason to spend their hard-earned money on your product.
What if they have to convince their boss that your product is good enough for their organization? Are you giving them enough reasons to continue using your product?
Conclusion
You never get a second chance to make a first impression. When you onboard a new client, be excited about it but don’t stop there. You have to make sure that your new client continues to use your service for as long as possible.
This is a never-ending process. And this is not the duty of customer support alone. With the adequate use of CRM, every employee in your company can get valuable information that will help you satisfy and keep your customers.
