Making sales and answering customer queries is one thing, but to truly delve into the mind of your customer takes skill… or a few handy pointers.
Would you sell steak to a vegetarian? Nope, me neither. Selling products to customers who clearly don’t have an interest in what you have to offer is a waste of energy and precious selling time. But at what point, exactly, was it made clear that they don’t want what you’re offering? Without customer intelligence and analytics, you’ll never have the in-depth answers you need for approaching a sale, fully prepared. But there are ways of getting them…
Social Media: The New School Customer Analysis Platform
In the age of spying on colleagues and stalking your old school friends, social media can actually be used for some pretty productive purposes, especially when it comes to customer intelligence.
With the biggest insight into customer needs since… well, ever, not using social media to your advantage should be a crime. Even a top-level analysis merely exploring what people have to say to you, about you, or even the competition, can reveal real-time customer insights that simply weren’t available a decade ago.
Also, the likes of Twitter Analytics and Facebook Audience insights can examine exactly how well your profile is performing, what gets shared, commented on, and what is generally deemed interesting by your customers. Using all this data can be a major help in defining who your customers are, as well as if they have any major gripes, or even specific desires, for your company.
Email: The Old Skool Customer Insight Platform
What? That thing that we’ve all but denounced in recent blog posts and infographics? We didn’t say it was all bad. In fact, when it comes to email marketing campaigns, the data provided by the feedback can offer valuable insight into customer behavior. Knowing your customer by general demographic will help to form an email marketing campaign, but monitoring that campaign once it has gone live is where the real intelligence comes in.
Though you won’t quite get your hands on the answers to what they ate for dinner last night or whether they’re a Walking Dead or Game of Thrones fan (it’s not that intelligent), understanding who’s opening your emails, if they’re reading them, and how exactly they’re responding to them will aid you with your sales strategy.
Survey: The Customer Behaviour Quiz
If we had a penny for every time we heard ‘How do I understand my customer?’, we’d probably have enough to buy a Freddo by now. Yes, we’re inundated. The easiest, and possibly most reliable way of obtaining data on your customers to answer that question, is by asking the very people you want answers about. Customer surveys give an often anonymous platform for your customers to answer the questions you want answered. As you can choose exactly what you want to ask, and even set the range of answers, you can glean whatever you like from a customer survey.
Getting customers to take it is the hard part, but that’s where the marketing comes in. Why not offer a gift voucher, a percentage off the next time they order a new product from you or even an item for everyone who fills out the survey?
CRM – The All-in-One Customer Intelligence Solution
Understanding your customer needs by exploring all the above channels is a great way to start interpreting your customers’ needs and pain points, but with BI, a much deeper form of analysis is done for you.
The automated nature of sales performance software like BI allows you to sit back and watch both The Walking Dead and Game of Thrones while using social media to see what your customers are saying, while your pre-meeting reports are being written for you in the background.
And when you’re good and ready, log into the system and access the data you need – quickly and easily.
This saves you hours of meeting prep time every week to spend with the family (or zombies/Westerosi, whichever you prefer), but also allows you to better understand your customer; the reports BI software can create in seconds offer much greater and more accurate detail than you have time to put together simply because you’re so busy selling.
Exploring the minds of your customers through a multitude of channels is the best way to really get to know them from the inside out. Armed with that knowledge, you’re ready to sell like you’ve never sold before.
