In today’s automated world, self-service has allowed customers to become increasingly independent. In fact, according to research from Forrester, B2B buyers want to self-educate rather than engage with a sales representative by a factor of nearly three to one. Meanwhile, seven in 10 indicate that buying products and services for work from a website is more convenient than buying from a sales rep. As if that weren’t enough, Gartner predicts that customers will manage as much as 85 percent of their business relationships without any human interaction by 2020.
While the efficiencies findings like these lead to are great news from an operational point of view, when it comes to sales, it’s a different story. Greater self-services means that sales teams get fewer opportunities to engage with prospects and clients. As a result, they’re under pressure to make the most out of the few interactions that they do get to have.
The key to doing so, of course, is making sure that those interactions are as tailored and relevant as possible.
“85 percent of buyers say that they will dismiss a seller in the first interaction if they don’t receive tailored information.
To create personalized experiences, sellers need a deep understanding of their customers. They have to know exactly who they are, what they care about, and what their unique pain points are. And while it’s easy to gather that and other information with the help of a good customer relationship management (CRM) system, using that data to manually create personalized experiences at scale can be incredibly difficult.
In this post, we’ll look at one way your client-facing team can get around that challenge by enhancing your CRM with a sales enablement platform.
CRM + Sales Enablement = Personalization
CRMs comprise the biggest software market in the world, and are projected to be valued at an estimated $80 billion by 2025. Not surprisingly, what this suggests is that virtually every business either already uses, or soon will use, a CRM to help drive sales. And while a good CRM is incredibly useful since it serves as an organization’s single source of truth for customer data, the reality is that out of the box, most CRMs have their limitations. Not only that, they also typically suffer from low adoption rates because most salespeople find them cumbersome to use and difficult to maintain.
The way to get around these and other limitations, and solve the personalization challenge, is by integrating your CRM with a sales enablement platform. Doing so allows your sales teams to automatically create highly personalized content at scale, so that you’re able to give individual prospects and clients the customized experiences they want at the click of a button.
Better Together
The way it works is simple. Your CRM manages your customers and your sales process. Meanwhile, the right sales enablement platform will allow you to manage all of the content you need to engage those customers and close deals, right within the CRM.
By integrating with your CRM, and receiving live feeds from it, other enterprise systems, and even Excel, all of your content can be dynamically updated to reflect the latest real-time data. Not only that, the sales enablement tool will deliver contextually relevant content right to your workspace in your CRM so that you’re always able to share the content that’s most relevant for each individual client you’re reaching out to.
Simply put, your sales teams will benefit from seamless meeting follow-ups by receiving automated insights into what to do or what content to send prospects and customers next. Meanwhile, they also receive actionable insights into what content is and isn’t working throughout the full lifecycle of a sale. In that way, they can further refine and customize their approach to help maximize their chances of success.
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As we’ve seen, these days personalization is more important than ever. The key to unlocking that personalization is to enable your CRM to enable your sellers.
