4 Account Management Skills for Sales Success
One of the most common questions I get asked as a coach is: What are the account management skills I need to keep my customers for as long as possible? The answer is simpler than most people expect: Learn how to hunt and farm.Traditionally, sales and account management has been divided into what psychotherapist Thom Hartmann calls the hunter mindset and the farmer mindset. The hunter mindset (sales) is characterised by an attention span that’s hyper focused for short bursts of time. This mindset helps sellers lock down deals quickly. The farmer mindset (account management) is marked by patience and consistency. Farmer types nurture relationships over the long term, bearing fruit in the form of upsells, cross-sells, and referrals. The most successful account managers bring together the best of both worlds. They keep clients happy while expanding the account to include new products. If you want to perfect this balance, I recommend honing four key skills: proactive service and support, collaborative problem-solving, stakeholder communication, and identifying account expansion opportunities.What is account management?Account management focuses on supporting customers after the close to make sure they’re satisfied with their new products or services. The best account management strategies emphasise building long-term relationships, which open the door to upsells and cross-sells, and generate additional revenue.Go beyond the close with the right account management skillsSuccessful account management is a balancing act, combining nimble decision-making, teamwork, and outside-the-box thinking. Here are the skills you need to make your account management top-notch:1. Be proactive, not reactiveToo often, account managers think of themselves as order processors or “maintainers” who come in after a sale, attending to customer concerns and putting out fires. This is important, of course, but it’s reactive. To build trust with your customer, be proactive about delivering solutions and solving problems. Keep an eye on their deal in your customer relationship management platform (CRM) as it moves toward a close. Look for signs of potential issues, like:Unanswered questions about product featuresConcerns about costLack of preparation for product training or onboarding supportIf you have a solid relationship with the seller who owns the deal, consider suggesting ways to address lingering concerns. If the seller doesn’t have time to address them, prepare materials you can give the customer as soon as the deal is done and handed off to the account management team. The gold mine here comes from farming. Don’t go chasing upsells or cross-sells right away. Earn the customer’s trust by putting their interests and success first. Once they see your commitment and a solid ROI, you can approach conversations around new or additional deals.2. Collaborate to improve account handoffsThe sales-to-account-management handoff is a critical moment in the customer experience. It’s a perfect opportunity to deliver on promises made during the sales process and set the tone for potential upsells and renewals. Instead of treating this as a priority, I see a lot of teams do the bare minimum. The account manager spins up a quick email introducing themself, offering to answer any questions about the deal. But this is so open-ended, it’s unhelpful. How does the customer know who to contact for product questions? Pricing questions? What about new deals? A better solution: The account manager schedules a meeting with all the point people the customer needs to know as they get up to speed on their new product or service. The list varies depending on the product and the customer’s needs, but generally includes someone from the product team, the sales rep, the account manager, and representatives from customer service and finance. The meeting should outline what happens as customer success takes over the account from sales, and who the primary contact is (you, the account manager). Introduce yourself as the customer’s point of contact, and then briefly introduce the stakeholders. Make it known that they’ll help with support, but all initial questions should flow through you. Then, review next steps, provide resources to help them get started, and leave time for questions.The goal: Make it clear the customer is supported by a team of experts that are ready and willing to help them succeed.3. Communicate like a trusted advisorAccording to LIKE.TG’s State of the Connected Customer Report, 74% of customers say communicating honestly and transparently is more important now than before the pandemic. Little wonder. In times of change, communication is the number-one way to build and maintain trust. That trust is what allows you to build loyalty and, when the time is right, secure upsells. There are two parts to honest and transparent communication. The first is proactive check-ins. A few days after the customer signs the deal, reach out to make sure there aren’t any outstanding questions from late in the sales process. Then, schedule a follow-up a few weeks out to ensure onboarding went well and the product is working as expected. What happens after that depends on customer needs and any updates you need to share. I suggest regular check-ins, but nothing more frequent than once a month — just to confirm that all is well with the product or service, and needs are being met. The exception: If a problem arises or you can’t follow through on a commitment, don’t wait for a check-in to let the client know. Be honest and upfront — then, offer a way forward. The second part involves responding to customer communication. To make sure you’re handling this in an effective and timely manner, create a system where you can rate the importance and urgency of different client needs, and triage accordingly. Set up a list of criteria to help you categorise incoming messages in four buckets: urgent and important, urgent, important, and standard/normal. Then, set response times for each one. At the very least, I recommend responding to urgent and important messages within 24 hours. For most account managers, it’s easiest to set up folders in your email client or CRM to keep client communication organised. If your CRM includes AI tools, I highly recommend using them to flag these automatically based on keywords that appear in incoming messages. Finally, be sure all your responses are underscored by empathy and understanding. Remember, you’re a trusted advisor, so live up to your reputation by being as helpful and supportive as possible.Get articles selected just for you, in your inboxSign up now4. Become an opportunity scout The three account management skills above are all about farming — building trust, rapport, and connection with the customer. When you have a strong, positive relationship (based on feedback noting satisfaction with the product/service and support), it’s time to tap into the hunter mindset.Think about upsells and product expansions as inevitable endpoints in the relationship. In other words, while you’re farming, be proactive about finding opportunities for upselling or expanding the account to other products or services. During periodic check-ins with the customer, ask questions to help you surface upsell opportunities. Gently frame these questions to show you’re keeping their needs and pain points in mind so they can stay successful. Here are a few examples:I’m so glad things are going well with our product. Do you have enough licences to last you through the end of the year? I know there’s a big end-of-year push for you, so I’m happy to fold in some more licences at a discount now so you don’t have to worry about it later.I saw on LinkedIn that you’re adding a new marketing division. Congrats! We just launched an email marketing tool that integrates with the platform you onboarded a few months ago. Any interest in a test run?I know you were looking at the next subscription tier for our product, but also noted some budget cuts. How about I give you an extended trial run for that upgraded tier to see if it helps boost productivity? When you get a bite, bring in stakeholders from the product and finance teams to share details. Offer to set up a demo call. Keep your solution top of mind with regular check-ins and free resources like ebooks, white papers, and trials. However you proceed, make sure your conversations are centred on the customer’s success. At the end of the day, all they care about is hitting their own goals.Ready the harvest, begin the huntAcquiring new customers is a costly endeavour. Keeping loyal customers often delivers higher ROI, but this depends on account managers who can harness both hunting and farming mindsets. Get ahead of potential problems, take time to plan an effective handoff, be hyper communicative, and jump on upsells and cross-sells when the moment is right. At every stage, make sure you’re squarely focused on the customer and their success. If you can manage that, you’re a lot more likely to retain those high-value customers, secure upsells, and boost your revenue.Adrian Davis, author of “Human-to-Human Selling: How to Sell Real and Lasting Value in an Increasingly Digital and Fast-Paced World,” contributed to this article.
4 Disciplines to Put Organisations on the Path to Customer Centricity
Most companies understand the key to growth is strong relationships with their customers. In fact, the drive towards customer centricity is at the forefront of many digital transformations. Unfortunately, not all transformation projects deliver their targeted outcomes. We often see this when digital transformation gets treated as a ‘renovation’. In other words, companies simply digitise processes instead of thinking about how to evolve them. Digital transformations of this kind may deliver incremental improvements in efficiency or service. However, they fall short of transforming the customer experience. To make customer centricity and growth a reality, companies need to shift their focus from renovate to evolve. Here, we share four disciplines that can help. 1. Customer-centric business processes Many companies grew up in an era when success was product-centric and the only way to scale was through standardisation. However, today’s customers demand personalisation and are rewriting the rules of success. To truly evolve, companies need to pivot from product-centric processes that drive internal productivity to customer-centric processes that enable more connected and personalised experiences. A great example of a company that reimagined itself and moved from product to customer-centric processes is M1 in Singapore. Personalisation is at the heart of M1’s transformation. The dynamic digital network operator has brought many innovations to the Singapore market and now seeks to set a new standard for what a digital experience looks like in its industry. As part of this, M1 is using LIKE.TG to connect different touchpoints and provide customers with personalised experiences, no matter which blend of channels they use. “At M1, our new brand and promise of providing hyper-personalised experiences and services for our customers is supported by our digital transformation. With our partners, we want to focus on building an innovative and forward-looking technology infrastructure to keep M1 at the forefront of building Singapore’s digital economy while driving real value to our customers,” said Nathan Bell, Chief Digital Officer, M1. 2. One team aligned around the customer To deliver exceptional customer experiences, companies need to align themselves around customer needs. This requires abandoning the organisational structures inherited from the early 20th century. Then, there were rigid divisions between functions like sales, service, marketing, and production. Now, however, companies benefit from more flexible, flatter team structures. Shared metrics for success and tools for cross-functional collaboration are also important. A ‘one team’ approach sometimes includes mobilising partners to create a frictionless customer experience. These partners could include technology partners, service providers, channel partners, and any others in an organisation’s ecosystem that can have an impact on the customer experience. 3. Leanest possible technology stack Achieving the leanest possible technology stack is an important part of any successful transformation as it reduces time and costs spent ‘keeping the lights on’ and increases the capacity to innovate. CRM plays an increasingly central role in this stack as it supports the delivery of more personalised customer experiences. Additionally, as companies look to evolve and future-proof their technology stack, there’s a shift towards using APIs and low-code tech for efficient integration. 4. Sense and respond Putting the previous three disciplines into place provides an incredible foundation for customer centricity, but it is not quite enough. The problem is that customers’ needs, expectations, and behaviour are changing faster than ever. Companies need to sense and respond to these changes in near real-time. Otherwise, they risk falling behind their more agile competitors. This requires a shift in organisational culture and increased transparency of data. Unlocking new customer insights was a core component of AXA Singapore’s digital transformation. Driven to become the world’s best digital insurer, AXA Singapore has developed a digital ecosystem, spanning sales, service, and marketing. LIKE.TG is one of the building blocks of this ecosystem and provides a single view of the customer throughout. “With LIKE.TG, we have more insight into our customers and can personalise and automate touch points like email and SMS,” said Tomasz Kurczyk, Chief Transformation and Digital Officer, at AXA Singapore. “If a customer purchases single trip travel insurance, for example, we can send an email after their trip to welcome them back and remind them how to submit a claim. We can also promote other products and the MyAXA app, our self-serve one stop shop for customers.” Getting started on the journey Digital transformation can mean different things to different companies and encompass initiatives both big and small. What is useful about these four disciplines is that they can be applied universally to ensure a customer-centric result. They can also set the stage for the next level of transformation—transcend—where companies can create entirely new value chains. To learn more or get started on your transformation journey, check out our advisory services.
4 Expert Tips on How To Build Your Retail Experience Around Customers
Retailers have been incredibly responsive to changes in consumer demand, supply chain availability, and store operations over the past two years. In a short time, brands and retailers launched a variety of new services and customer experiences. These included options to buy-online-pickup-in-store, virtual appointments, flexible payment options, and livestream e-commerce. As a result, customer expectations for what makes a great digital experience have increased. In fact, more than 80% of B2B and B2C customers now believe the experience provided by a company is as important as its products or services. The greatest challenge now — for B2C and B2B businesses — is to keep up with customer expectations. Expectations of customers in both groups are converging in terms of speed, connectedness, and personalisation. How can retailers harness technology and data to deliver a seamless customer experience and build relationships? LIKE.TG’s Global Head of Retail and Consumer Goods Industry Advisors, Matt Marcotte, shares his top tips: Tip 1: Collect data at every customer touchpoint Recommendations and personalisation are only as good as the data you collect and the accuracy of it. Take every opportunity to ask your customers about their likes, wants, and desires at every touchpoint with the brand. Tip 2: Let your brand’s personality shine Whether it’s a promotion, limited quantities, or just reminding them to complete their purchase, it’s not just about sending the message. The tone of voice and approach makes people either want to engage with you or just ignore your message. Find creative, fun, and personal ways to engage customers. Tip 3: Make sure customer service is 24/7 One of the biggest customer frustrations is not being able to get in touch with a brand when they need to. The right combination of self-service chatbots and customer service agents — with access to the customer’s data — is critical to ensure not only fast resolution of an issue, but also excellent customer experience. These types of engagements can make or break a brand and people’s willingness to continue buying from them. Tip 4: Tap into social media feedback Once brands see comments from customers, it is critical that they connect with that customer, deepen the relationship, and gather more information to inform their single source of truth. Just listening is not enough — customers want relationships with brands. Maximise every opportunity to build on that relationship through interaction. Creating genuine customer connections The brands that will experience the greatest success will be the ones that focus on: Connected customers: responding at the speed the customer expects by using a unified platform and centralised data. Connected stores: including virtual selling and engagement. Connected employees: empowering team members through mobile, virtual service, and intelligence capabilities. Together, these provide a seamless experience. It helps teams get smarter about their interactions with customers, and lets customers know you’re listening to them. The secret ingredient is a relentless focus on knowing your customer. It must be at the core of everything. Get this right, and you’ll serve the right product and message to the right customer, at the right time and place. Learn more about how consumer brands and retailers can deliver seamless, personalised experiences in our ebook The Connected Customer Experience: A Guide for Retail and Consumer Goods Brands in ASEAN:
4 Steps To Building a Successful Partnership Strategy
You want to get your product or service into the hands of more customers. Other companies might want to get your product out there, too — if it helps generate revenue for themselves. And that can form the foundation of a successful channel partnership strategy. As a channel partner or Cloud Reseller, you can increase your value to new and existing customers — and, in turn, grow your profits. We’ve seen this happen time and again over the last six years at LIKE.TG. And along the way, we’ve learned a number of important tips from successful partners, including how you can get your solutions to market faster. A key word we hear when we talk to our current partners is “scale.” They want to go big. And their main question is: What is the key to scale our sales efforts and maximise revenue? Let’s start thinking through the four steps to help you define your partnership strategy: 1. Understand where you win Identify your best, high-growth products, market, and segments. Start by gathering your facts, sales data, recent information about closed deals, and success stories. Where are you trending in regards to market segments and verticals? Which product combinations are selling the best in each region? Action: From your wins, define what can complement your solution to your end customer. Talk to your customers and get feedback by asking the following questions: What makes their decision making easier? What helps the sales process go smoother? What do they believe creates better alignment? What makes your solution more attractive compared to your competition in the market? 2. Establish the business goals for your partnership strategy Understanding where you win — what regions and verticals — will help you target areas that you want to invest in. Sharing this information will also make it easier for partners to recognise an opportunity where they can partner with you to get to market faster. Questions to ask yourself: Are you looking to co-market/co-sponsor events? Are you looking at expanding into new markets and regions? New market segments and verticals? Are you looking to work with other LIKE.TG partners who complement your technology? Are you looking for other LIKE.TG partners who can support your implementations and provide professional services? Are you looking to leverage existing networks and expand your coverage through your partner channel? Look at your competitors’ partner programs, including the type of partners they target, the events they sponsor, and how they are incentivising and creating value. Action: Answer the above questions, and identify the top two reasons you are looking to partner. Write down your business goals for the partnership strategy. Now, define the three benefits you can accomplish by developing partnerships in the ecosystem. 3. Develop measurable objectives Here are some questions to answer in order to set revenue targets for your partner program: What is your predicted partner-led revenue as a percentage of your total revenue? If you have worked with partners to drive revenue in the past, what was the dollar amount your partners generated over the last two years? Consider joint marketing efforts with your partners, and the amount your partners will contribute to that program. Below are some potential scenarios: Is it more cost-effective to embed a partner solution instead of building it in house? If yes, have you evaluated potential partners? If no, perform a cost analysis to develop, maintain, and upgrade the solution. If you are looking to get more leads and referrals through an extended network, is there a software company that has many of the same customers? Reach out to develop joint marketing plans. What about a partner who is already in your target vertical or market? To build a better brand and create awareness, consider the partners that have done a great job in this area. Can you brainstorm together? Partnerships are there to help you with all of the above, but prioritise your business goals, and have clear objectives so that you can pick the right partners. Then, put a partnership strategy together and drive toward success. What you can do now Getting started is half the challenge. Begin with these four activities on your journey. Measure and know your business metrics and your customer profile Define your goals and business needs Determine the amount you are going to spend on your defined objectives Determine the amount you are expecting your potential partner to drive 4. Set yourself up for success with LIKE.TG Partner Program The LIKE.TG Partner Program enables our partners to build and grow successful businesses while delivering ongoing and meaningful customer success. The Program has been designed with a fair and transparent partnership model to create a thriving and connected ecosystem where it is easier for partners to collaborate and do business with LIKE.TG. Under the program, partners are given access to premium tools and resources they can leverage to supercharge their sales and marketing strategy, and take their solutions to the next level. Some resources you can look forward to: Pardot Plus Premier Success Plan Accelerate Program Platform Experts & AppExchange Performance Incentive & Referral fees Access to Marketing Development Fund and many other Partner Marketing assets/resources Find out more about LIKE.TG Partner Program Overview here. Learn how marketers can drive growth with innovation. DOWNLOAD GUIDE This post originally appeared on the U.S.-version of the LIKE.TG blog.
4 Steps to Help You Build a Resilient Marketing Strategy
Nearly every business is worried about — or already facing — slowing or declining revenue growth, as many experts feel we’re heading toward challenging times. With this, the “growth at all costs” mantra of the past decade is quickly shifting to one of business resiliency and sustainable growth. Resilient marketing focuses on the ability to absorb stress, maintain healthy business operations, and adapt to new conditions. Businesses that focus more on long-term sustainability can emerge from the current economic climate stronger than they were before. These are 4 ways leaders can build resilient marketing in their organisations. 1. Realise how resilient marketing helps optimise your marketing spend Marketing budgets are often under increased scrutiny during economic uncertainty. You’ll need to defend your marketing efforts by validating their impact and demonstrating clear results. Yet, 80% of marketers say their ability to track return for each marketing investment needs improvement. Investing in data analytics capabilities can help you: Make the most of your marketing budget Reallocate spend from low-performing campaigns Quickly adjust current campaigns Suppress marketing messages for customers with open service cases Clearly demonstrate your team’s impact on revenue 2. Evaluate the efficiency of your current systems — and cut what doesn’t work You’ve probably already felt the increased pressure to more strictly control — and in many cases — reduce marketing costs. Marketers are looking to reduce their spending on campaigns that aren’t resonating with customers and move that money toward bigger initiatives. A great place to start is by evaluating your marketing technology tools to see how well they’re still working for you. Has this become increasingly complex and bloated over the past decade? Marketing teams use 23 different marketing systems, on average. Begin by evaluating your tech stack to identify redundancies, inefficiencies, and tools that your team doesn’t really use anymore. Identify areas where you can: Consolidate systems and contacts Eliminate inefficient tools Reduce maintenance & support costs 3. Find more efficient ways to achieve your goals, despite shifting budgets Most marketing organisations are not growing as fast as they previously hoped, and in many cases they are shrinking. You may be grappling with how to make your department more efficient and agile in these rapidly-changing times. For example, 29% of marketers spend at least one week or more every month preparing data — that’s time that could be better spent developing and executing resilient marketing strategies. To remain agile as marketing budgets shift, you need to make every marketing moment count: Automate time-consuming, error-prone tasks like Excel-based data integration and reporting, so your team is free to focus on bigger problems Identify strategies to scale personalisation efforts, like using AI to tailor newsletter content to each reader, improving campaign effectiveness Hold a call with your marketing team to identify bottlenecks like requiring IT to make basic changes to campaigns, so you can improve speed of campaign execution Explore ways to better collaborate with remote teams, ensuring everyone is on the same page Find ways to streamline your operations, placing a focus on agility. This way, you’ll be prepared — not panicking — when things change. 4. Lead with the value to the consumer As new customer acquisition becomes more challenging during economic uncertainty, marketers should adopt a strategy that focuses on retaining current customers and making sure they feel they’re getting the most value. This helps protect existing revenue and is one of the surest paths to continued growth during times of uncertainty. To help customers get the most value from your products, you should consider investments in the following areas: Developing a first-party data strategy, making better use of data you collect from customer interactions Making sure customers have what they need after the sale, anticipating needs such as onboarding, education or complementary products Identifying and re-engaging customers who are undecided about purchasing Improving customer experience through real-time personalisation Starting a customer loyalty program Building immersive and customer-first experiences, such as augmented and virtual reality Keep your focus on moving forward It can be tempting to pause innovation during times of economic uncertainty. However, research from McKinsey says otherwise. They found that organisations that maintained their focus on innovation throughout the 2009 financial crisis outperformed the market average by more than 30% in the following three to five years. Marketing leaders need to act now to optimise marketing spend with a slimmer budget, improve adaptability, and work to keep current customers. Resilient marketing helps grow revenue and profitability while also giving your team the ability to innovate and outperform your competition in the long run. Dive deeper into all the trends and insights shaping the marketing landscape. Download the Marketing Intelligence Report. This post originally appeared on the U.S.-version of the LIKE.TG blog.
4 Tips for Retailers to Make Customers Come Back for More
The rising cost of living means retailers need to work harder to attract new shoppers and keep existing customers coming back for more. How do you balance the online and in-store retail shopping experience? How do you improve the buying process? How do you keep customers satisfied while they spend? The simple answer is to create a seamless retail shopping experience that connects digital and physical touchpoints to make your customers come back for more. For companies, it starts with creating agility across online and mobile commerce channels. This also means giving customers greater flexibility when browsing and buying, no matter how they choose to shop. Here’s what you can do to get your online and brick-and-mortar channels ready for the shopping season. Tip #1: Offer faster mobile commerce experiences Put yourself in the shoes of a customer who is waiting to get the best shopping deals during Singles’ Day. Would you rather travel to the malls, pull out your laptop, or grab your phone to shop? With ecommerce shopping events — double-digit days, Black Friday, and Cyber Monday, becoming increasingly common and popular every year, it has never been more important to optimise your mobile commerce experience. In fact, in the second quarter of 2022, mobile accounted for 81% of traffic share and 66% of total order share in ASEAN. It’s time to make phone and tablet shopping seamless and more efficient with: Mobile-specific marketing: Does your mobile app send push notifications when an out-of-stock product returns to inventory in time for delivery? Do you send well-timed text messages to your best customers when a flash sale starts? If not, it’s time to add that to your retail strategy and boost engagement with an integrated experience across every touchpoint. Hassle-free browsing and checkout: Opt for simple designs that load fast and add bigger “buy now” buttons that are easy to find on a mobile device. Consider enabling one-step purchases right from the product page, and don’t forget to add convenience-focused payment options. Mobile wallets, for example, ensure customers won’t have to scramble at the point of purchase to find their credit card. An optimised post-purchase experience: Consider that 41% of digital leaders are prioritising experiences like returns optimisation over the next two years. Ensure your self-service channels are optimised for mobile so customers can accomplish routine tasks easily and efficiently from their phones. Tip #2: Make social selling part of the retail shopping experience How can you help your customers find the right products when so much depends on Instagram images on a small screen? By enabling associates (or even influencers) to interact with your customers on a live stream, you can turn virtual retail shopping into a personalised and engaging experience. Your customers will be able to see the product from different angles, ask about flexible fulfilment options like same day delivery or in-store pickup, and inquire about return policies in real-time. That process helps customers avoid buying items that won’t work and has the potential to reduce online return rates. Leading retailers are already capturing customers’ attention on platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok. That’s not just for show: All signs indicate that social commerce is just getting started. In fact, it’s predicted to grow three times faster than traditional ecommerce over the next four years. “Consumers live on their phones, and pushing your brand experience and checkout to these social networks helps remove the friction that a consumer encounters between discovery and purchase,” Rob Garf, LIKE.TG’s vice president and general manager, retail, said. Tip #3: Prioritise fulfilment and inventory optimisation Imagine the disappointment when finding out the product you ordered online is out of stock or stuck somewhere on a congested supply chain. As retailers face inventory and shipment challenges, digital leaders are solving the problem by prioritising fulfillment and inventory optimisation. What does that mean in simple terms? It means it’s time to solve the “where is my order” problem once and for all: Prioritise transparency: Does an offer for a comparable product mean your customers won’t mind if a shipment is delayed or unavailable? No. But at least you can be honest and transparent — 74% of customers say that trust is important. And by keeping an open line of communication, you can be the retail hero that shows up with potential solutions. Empower your customers: Ensure your customers can access their order history, track delivery, and use self-service to arrange a return or exchange. Enable flexible fulfilment options, like buy-online-pick-up-in-store (BOPIS), a choice that’s popular with customers and that’s been adopted by 85% of retailers. Rethink order management: The right order management system gives your online and in-store associates access to real-time inventory and fulfilment data. When your employees can follow customer orders from the point of purchase through delivery, they can stay proactive if there’s a problem — like offering a similar product that’s available for on-time shipment. This ensures effective and efficient communication with customers, and at the same time, frees up employees’ time to handle more important tasks. Tip #4: Add flexible payment options As inflation lingers, flexible payment options are bound to grow in popularity. Programs like buy-now-pay-later (BNPL) may make an important difference in the retail shopping experience and to retailers’ profitability. Digital leaders are twice as likely as digital laggards to prioritise investments in flexible payments. 61% digital leaders say they’re already offering BNPL as a payment option, while another 32% plan to add it in the next two years. Delaying payments or offering instalment options aren’t the only ways retailers are rethinking transaction flexibility. Apple Pay, for example, is increasing in popularity: While 54% already accept Apple Pay, another 34% plan to add the option within two years. Not only do mobile wallet options streamline transactions with one-click payments, they also expand the number of payment options customers have at checkout. Find out how to give shoppers the gift of convenience this year by removing friction from their retail shopping experience. This post originally appeared on the U.S.-version of the LIKE.TG blog.
4 Ways Field Service Technology Delivers Efficient and Safe Services
Companies across APAC are reopening after COVID-19 lockdowns. For many of them, building business resilience is a priority. How can they adapt to disruptions like COVID-19, while maintaining continuous operations and safeguarding people? This is particularly challenging for field services providers. Future lockdown directives may prevent field service technicians from visiting customers’ homes. Customers may also want to minimise visitors to their homes. Therefore, you will need to explore new ways to deliver superior customer service. At the same time, you have to prioritise the safety of your technicians and customers. This is possible with the right Field Services Management (FSM) technology. For example, using remote assistance tools can improve first-call resolutions while limiting physical contact. Here are four ways FSM technology can improve your field service operations, while protecting technicians and customers: 1. Understand your customers’ needs in the new normal Field service providers must adhere to physical distancing restrictions. To do so, you may need to reduce manpower and service capability. To neutralise this risk, reach out to your customers to understand their current needs. Then, reallocate the right skill set to meet customer demand. FSM technology enables effective reallocation by forecasting demand spikes across service territories. Use demand forecasting to mobilise back-up teams in places where service gaps occur. Demand forecasting can also identify high-demand areas that are suited to innovations like pop-up service centres. 2. Maintain service level agreements while ensuring worker and customer safety To limit in-person customer visits, use remote customer assistance tools. These include live video calls, augmented reality technology, or artificial intelligence. During the pandemic, Sports Engineering And Recreation Asia Ltd. (Seara) could not send technicians to customers’ homes. That did not stop the fitness equipment supplier from helping customers to install equipment. Group Customer Service Manager Nisarat Chokwattanakansir explains: Sometimes, in-person customer visits are necessary. In these cases, give your technicians access to remote support resources. When technicians can resolve cases on their first calls, they can avoid repeat visits. 3. Use FSM technology to increase customer service flexibility For example, Field Service Lightning (FSL) gives customers the flexibility to self-serve. Real-time communication from technicians also reduces the need for physical visits. If physical visits are a must, equip your technicians with FSL-connected devices. This can help to reduce incomplete operations due to missing information. FSL can also ensure that replacement parts are always available. This prevents your technicians from making repeat visits due to missing parts. Finally, FSL helps to match technicians to jobs within their field of expertise. This increases the likelihood that technicians solve cases on their first calls and minimises follow-up visits. 4. Simplify customer support processes A FSM management platform can do more than minimise customer visits. It can simplify customer support processes with self-service scheduling. It also increases visibility into the statuses of ongoing contracts, thus reducing uncertainty. FSL, for example, supports customer self-service with chat bots and knowledge base access. This is critical in view of physical distancing restrictions and cost effective in the long run. Ronnayot Leangumnuay, Deputy CEO at Advanced Business Solutions and Services Co., Ltd explains: Disruptions like COVID-19 do not have to derail your field service operations. With a FSM platform, you can use demand forecasting to close service gaps. You can also use remote customer help tools to improve first-call resolutions and increase customer satisfaction. But a FSM platform is capable of much more than crisis management. The right FSM platform can streamline customer support and provide opportunities for self-service.
4 Ways Financial Services Drive Growth With Personalised Experiences
Our research reveals firms must wrangle data better and track the entire customer journey to meet rising expectations. Prakash Thomas, Regional Vice President; Financial Services & Health, LIKE.TG Industries; ASEAN, shares four ways financial services institutions (FSIs) can drive growth through great digital experiences. Financial services customers have a message for their providers: they like doing business online — and they aren’t going back to pre-pandemic habits. That’s the good news from LIKE.TG research on financial services trends and the state of banking, insurance, and wealth management. The not-so-good news is that globally, customers are often dissatisfied with the digital experiences being offered by financial services institutions. In the past year, digital adoption has increased in varying degrees across banking, insurance, and wealth management. It has shown steady growth during a challenging time — continuing pandemic, growing inflation, and increasing economic and geopolitical uncertainty. Against this backdrop, digital adoption is proving to be not just resilient but unstoppable. In Asia, high rates of smartphone usage are driving growth in e-commerce and creating more opportunities for businesses to offer embedded financial services. According to a McKinsey study “Future of Asia” (Oct 2021), many financial consumers across Asia are taking this “mobile-first” approach. This leads to a rise of digital ecosystems, including highly integrated super apps that offer a one-stop-shop for a range of services. Banks are also introducing innovations like embedded finance and banking as-a-service platforms to participate in digital ecosystems. DBS Bank in Singapore, for example, is pursuing such digital ecosystem-based opportunities. It runs marketplaces in travel, mobility, and property, and an application programming interface (API) developer platform. So how can FSIs improve the digital experiences of their customers? To help answer that question, LIKE.TG conducted a survey of 2,250 customers in nine countries in April. We also interviewed six senior financial services executives in strategy, business development, and innovation to help understand how to improve service where it matters. Based on the responses we collected in The Future of Financial Services: Better Customer Experiences Start with Automation, here are our top insights: 1. Provide experiences that are easy and transparent The pandemic has forced financial services to focus on constantly evolving their digital experience. Both B2C and B2B financial service players needed to quickly enhance their technical capabilities to deliver more value to customers on their digital channels. The first expectation from today’s customers is, ‘I want to be able to access things digitally. I want to have a really clean website or a login page where I can access all the right features. I want a really great app.’ If you don’t have these capabilities yet, that’s a risk. Financial service institutions are losing customers to competitors because the online experience isn’t easy or intuitive. The appeal of “easy” is driving customers to digital-first financial services. In our survey, nearly half of respondents said easy and fast setup, verification, onboarding, and first-time use of the app were pushing them to try out the newer financial apps. 41% cited an easy and intuitive user interface and navigation as reasons to test out these newcomers. Transparency is another one of the financial services trends driving customers to newcomers. More than one in three survey respondents said they switched providers — whether banking, insurance, or wealth management — because of hidden fees and fine print. Then there’s the general category of unsatisfactory experiences that prompt customers to switch providers. More than one-third of insurance policyholders left their current provider for that reason. 2. Anticipate customer needs and show you care about their financial health Customers don’t just want products. They want to work with financial services that care about their financial health and personalise recommendations. Based on the insights from our survey participants, the industry is still falling short of customer expectations. Only 16% of banking customers, 15% of insurance customers, and 25% of wealth management consumers strongly agree that their vendors are invested in their financial wellbeing. To win customer trust and loyalty, financial services institutions should offer differentiated and value added services. Customers want you to anticipate their needs, similar to the way product companies know what customers want next or media companies anticipate which movies customers want to watch next. Only 11% of banking, 11% of insurance, and 18% of wealth management consumers agree that companies anticipate their financial needs. LIKE.TG research suggests FSIs can improve their ability to do this by using predictive personalisation based on each customer’s unique journey. According to a McKinsey 2021 personal financial survey, Asia’s share of active digital banking users increased to 88% compared to 65% four years ago. This is driving financial services to innovate to drive additional online sales. The study notes that consumer adoption of digital channels was initially strongest for transactional services. However in 2020, even high-touch products like mortgages have started to move to online channels. Overseas-Chinese Banking Corporation (OCBC) in Singapore launched a 60-minutes mortgage approval service for Singaporeans in May 2020 leveraging automation and straight-through processing of mortgages online. OCBC executed 30% of loans through this platform. Another example is RCBC, a retail bank in the Philippines which has made significant progress in transforming customer engagement via intelligent automation. With Marketing Cloud, the bank was able to leverage customer transaction history and demographics data to establish behavioural patterns. This helped build more personalised, automated campaigns and journeys. The collective efforts of automation enabled ₱4.5 billion incremental deposits from the term deposit campaign. Delivering this successfully requires a strong tech foundation that enables end-to-end visibility of individual custom journeys. 3. Use automation behind the scenes to create great customer experiences Creating simple automated workflows with customer data can enable delivering quick and efficient customer service. FSIs don’t need to change the entire systems or replace the whole infrastructure, according to the experts interviewed for the research. End-to-end automation can be complicated, expensive, and uncertain. Instead, they should strategically choose their specific problem spots and selectively apply automation for immediate ROI. Wealth managers are using automation to improve onboarding and lay the groundwork for more profitable relationships. Insurers are also using automation and other technology to help significantly reduce underwriting time. Automation can have a major positive impact on B2B services, where paperwork is more complex and time-consuming than in B2C services. 4. Get creative with metrics to get a complete picture of customers It can be especially hard for financial services institutions to create a holistic view of their customers. They don’t often have the same access to first-party data that retail businesses do. Plus, many large financial services companies are a combination of multiple smaller companies, which means customer data is scattered across different parts of the organisation. The experts interviewed for The Future of Financial Services also recommend several ways to approach this challenge: Forge partnerships with external data providers who can supplement customer insights. Think more creatively about the types of data needed and track every step of the customer journey to identify pain points. This means going beyond tallying accounts and diving into types of accounts (whether or not they’re primary) and the ratio of low-margin and high-margin engagements. Invite design partners to assess the customer journey and raise the quality of interactions. Leverage digital distribution channels to create a platform for driving product innovations enriched by broader data sets from across the value chain. Financial services trends point to a digital future This post was localised based on the original at the A.U. LIKE.TG blog.
4 Ways New Data Cloud Features Help You Personalise Ads
What’s next in first-party advertising? Our community came together in December at World Tour New York to learn about the latest marketing innovations and how to reach customers better. Here’s the scoop on our latest releases and updates — and what they can do for your business. Companies are now prioritising first-party customer data in their marketing campaigns. However, changes in data privacy laws, not to mention the fast-approaching cookieless future, make it tough for companies to meet these expectations without the right tools to collect and capitalise on that first-party data. In December, we announced new Data Cloud integrations with Google Display & Video 360 and LinkedIn. These integrations help companies connect their first-party data and execute automated, personalised advertising campaigns. Let’s take a look at how these innovations will help your advertising efforts. What is first-party data advertising? First-party data advertising uses information collected directly from your company’s customers or users to personalise and target advertising efforts. This valuable data, comprising customer preferences and interactions, enables your business to create highly tailored campaigns, enhancing the relevance of your messaging. In contrast to third-party data, customers consent to you using their first-party data, which your company directly manages. This leads to customer trust, as well as compliance with privacy regulations.By letting your customers tell you exactly who they are and what they want, you unlock more effective retargeting, personalised content creation, and an overall improved customer experience. What our new Data Cloud updates mean for your business As you explore how first-party data advertising can help your company, we want to make sure we tell you both the what and the why behind these new innovations. So what do these Marketing Cloud updates mean for you? You can improve the way you interact with your customers and your marketing systems, to do things like: Personalise at scale: With these new Data Cloud integrations, you can personalise advertising using a complete customer profile that unifies first-party data from customers across marketing, commerce, sales, service, or any touchpoint. Increase efficiency: The new integrations help you deliver the right message to the right person at the right time. You can do this with rapidly updated segment memberships, near real-time data sharing with advertising partners, and suppressing users that have already purchased or have open Service Cloud cases. Segment and activate quickly: You can now compress the weeks it takes to build out segments with legacy SQL-based tools into minutes. Drag-and-drop and natural language generative AI interfaces (coming February ‘24) help you create, test, and build segments quickly. Then you can immediately activate the new integrations with Google Display & Video 360 and LinkedIn alongside your other channels like email, SMS, web, app, and connected devices. This results in a more personalised experience for your customer on their preferred channel. Build trust with your customers: With these updates, it’s easier to build trust through messages that are more relevant to your customers and compliant with today’s regulations. The new Data Cloud integrations allow you to launch ad campaigns that are more relevant(using first-party data) and efficient, through the power of automation. Make your data work for you Want to see how Data Cloud can get you closer to your customers? Start with a quick lesson today on Trailhead, the free online learning platform from LIKE.TG. Let’s get started +300 points Module Data Cloud-Driven Interactions in Marketing Cloud What are some new things marketers can do with Data Cloud? We’ve covered how your business can benefit from these innovations. Now let’s look at some specific ways you can use them to improve your results: Create connected advertising experiences across display, video, TV, audio, and other channels with Google Display & Video 360. You can improve customer loyalty with engaging and seamless advertising by using unified customer profiles from Data Cloud. This allows you to deliver personalised ads and campaign measurement across multiple channels. For example, a media brand can increase loyal customers and retain at-risk subscribers by using AI insights to engage audiences in Google Ads campaigns, targeting those who are most likely to upgrade or churn with relevant messages and offers. Target a network of over 1 billion active professionals on LinkedIn based on job title, function, industry, and more. You can use first-party data, combined with AI-powered product interest scoring from Marketing Cloud, Sales Cloud, and Service Cloud, and product usage data from your own apps to reach more customers. For example, with Data Cloud, a tech company can create an end-to-end program to increase awareness and promote relevant upsell and cross-sell conversion opportunities to grow their sales pipeline. Greater efficiency, effectiveness, and personalisation are top of mind for every business looking to improve their advertising strategy. Capitalising on trusted first-party data within your advertising is the key to delivering the experiences customers want — and the campaign performance your company needs The new first-party data advertising integrations with Google Display & Video 360 and LinkedIn are expected to be generally available in Q1 2024.
4 Ways Thai SMEs Are Leading the Way in Digital Transformation
Over the last few years, small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in Thailand have embraced technology faster than many other countries, according to LIKE.TG’s latest research. Thai SMEs faced a range of challenges related to customer expectations, and they adapted quickly. The determination they have shown in the face of adversity has been admirable. The rapid adoption of technology is a testament to the perseverance and creativity of SMEs and the communities in which they operate. In the same research, Thai SMEs identified the following as the top three challenges they experienced in the past year: Keeping up with demand Providing a quality product Personalising customer engagement This year’s Small and Medium Business Trends Report provides an insightful benchmark for what’s changed and what we can expect from SMEs if they move ahead. Digital transformation has peaked in Thailand, as the research showed that 100% of Thai SMEs have shifted their operations online and most believe that the shifts they’ve made will benefit their business in the long run. We can expect to see more contactless services in Thailand as up to 99% of Thai SMEs plan to offer contactless services permanently. Based on the data presented in the Small and Medium Business Trends Report, we have pulled out four key themes important to Thai SMEs: Embracing the digital-first future Prioritising customer loyalty Meeting local employee needs Adopting technology Embracing the digital-first future The circumstances of the last few years forced many businesses to reappraise the way they worked, and the ways they engaged with their customers. Despite some new restrictions on in-person interactions, communities and customers still want to support SMEs. In response, SME leaders are prioritising moving their businesses online, so they can connect with customers from the comfort of their homes. One hundred percent of Thai SMEs have shifted their operations online to meet customer needs. Alongside this, 96% of SMEs in Thailand have said that changes they’ve made to their operations over the last two years will have a long-term benefit to their business. This contrasts with the same data for the rest of the world. Internationally, the number of SMEs who have moved their operations online is a little lower. Ninety-five percent report that they have moved operations onto the Internet. Interestingly, only 75% of SME owners across the world think that the changes they’ve made will benefit their business in the years to come. Prioritising customer loyalty As Neeracha Taychakhoonavudh, Executive Vice President, Global Customer Success and Strategy, recently said, “customer loyalty is the new currency.” Around the world, an average of 29% of SMEs said that they are prioritising the development of ongoing relationships rather than one-time transactions. In Thailand, this number is much higher: 51%. After more than a year of adjusting to customer demand and bringing innovations to the fore, however, SMEs still face significant hurdles. These include personalising customer engagements, responding quickly to inquiries, engaging customers on their preferred channels, and providing a connected experience. This has proven that using the right technology will be the business differentiator for sustainability, success, and growth in this fast-changing environment. Thai SMEs have adopted new practices to meet changing customer expectations. Our research has shown that 79% have offered more flexibility for customers and 75% are more careful about their communications. In addition, 68% have expanded the number of ways customers can reach them. Local conditions change employee expectations While customer expectations are changing, employee expectations are also evolving. In Thailand, we saw that local conditions made a big difference in what employees were most concerned about. Among Thai workers, widespread vaccination against COVID-19 was the number one employee expectation. This was followed by mask usage and social distancing in the workplace. In the rest of the world, access to flexible schedules was at the top of the list. Mask usage was also important to these employees, followed by the daily sanitation of their workspace and materials. Whilst it can be interesting to look at the differences between SMEs around the world, it can also be illuminating to look at the similarities. SMEs everywhere have identified that employee trust and engagement is important, and the ways they earn that trust seem to be universal. Collaboration, responding to personal needs, and asking for employee feedback all feature high on the list of priorities, both in Thailand and around the world. Adoption of technology When we look at the adoption of CRM systems, there’s a significant difference. More than 80% of Thai SMEs have implemented a CRM system to help them maintain customer relationships and win deals. That’s compared to an average of only 56% globally. Thai businesses have stepped up their adoption of technology systems for specific roles, too: Seventy-one percent of Thai SMEs have accelerated tech investments in customer service, compared to just 41% of global SMEs. When it comes to both sales and marketing, 68% of Thai SMEs have adopted technology solutions, whereas only 40% of global SMEs have done the same. For IT operations, 77% of SMEs in Thailand have adopted new tech solutions, compared to 39% of SMEs globally. Finally, 52% of Thai SMEs have implemented human resources solutions, against only 25% of SMEs around the world. The majority of SME leaders (62%) cite technology as the reason that they have been able to stay afloat over the last few years. We have seen SMEs across the board adopting technology to solve a range of problems, such as marketing automation or collaboration. The full Small and Medium Business Trends Report contains even more insight from around the world to help you succeed in 2022. Download a translated version in Thai here.
4 Ways These Two Businesses Improved Efficiency Through Automation
“I would say automation now is a must for all companies.” That was the opinion of Khun Gigs-Kasin Suthammanas, CEO and Co-Founder of Finnomena Group, in a recent discussion on the State of Service. And he’s not alone. Businesses around the world are looking for ways to automate, improve productivity, and reduce costs. In the face of increasing costs and evolving customer demands, organisations are turning to trusted tools and platforms to help them with their automation requirements. According to a recent study, LIKE.TG customers who use Customer 360 are achieving 27% faster automation of business processes, and a 26% increase in employee productivity. At the same time, by consolidating the apps they use, they are reducing IT costs by 25%.* Khun Gigs was joined for the conversation by Konlawachara Trakulsuk, known as Khun Bank, General Manager for Product Management at Central Group, and Dr Ruthairat Protprakorn, Regional Sales Director at LIKE.TG. The group discussed the various ways that Finnomena and Central Group have been able to automate their operations across service and sales. Automated contact centre tools make things easier for agents Khun Gigs explained how automated call routing has cut down on admin time for service agents, and also led to more customer satisfaction. Many calls that Finnomena deals with involve personal customer data, information about savings and revenue. “We have 200,000 customers and 300–400 new customers daily,” said Khun Gigs. “What if you called in and our contact centre recognised you and directed your call to the advisor you talked to previously. How great would that be?” By routing customers to an agent they have encountered before, Finnomena can reduce admin time and increase customer confidence. In fact, LIKE.TG customers have reported that automation tools provided by Service Cloud have led to a 27% reduction in service and support costs.* LIKE.TG tools for contact centres extend beyond simple call routing. Khun Bank gave an example related to Central Group brand PowerBuy. “When someone makes a purchase from PowerBuy, there will sometimes be after-sales activity when there are cracks, defects, or repairs. Sometimes customers can’t explain the situation via voice and text services, and it consumes a lot of the agent’s time.” Central Group would find that service agents were using their own devices to receive photographs or make video calls so they could better understand the issues the customer was facing. Of course, this was not a secure way of communicating, either for the agent or the customer. But, using Visual Remote Assistant in Service Cloud, Central Group empowered their service agents to communicate using photos and video functions within the app, speeding up the entire process and creating a happier outcome for the customer. “We have closed the gap. All the data is secure and in the right place for future investigations. We have reduced the handling time and connected better with customers, and we can close the case successfully,” said Khun Bank. Automated account creation and verification speeds up the customer experience Another innovation that benefits both customers and service agents is the automation of account creation and verification at Finnomena. In the past, customers would register and have to wait two days before they received a call from the Finnomena agent. “Our process took two days to work over data on the cloud, to identify if they were an existing customer, and to find out who they had spoken to in the past. All of that before the sales assignment stage,” says Khun Gigs. “I knew that wasn’t right – when customers express their interest it means they want the product or service straight away.” LIKE.TG helped customise all Finnomena’s customer journeys. After the LIKE.TG implementation, data within applications became real-time. Today, if you register with Finnomena online, an agent will call you back within 2 hours. “I’m so happy with this solution. We have seen a better conversion rate. And we can serve customers when they want us,” said Khun Gigs. Automated cross-sales and lead scoring increases sales productivity As seen in our State of the Connected Customer report, customers expect more than 60% of their interactions with businesses to be online. At the same time, nearly half of all customers said they have switched brands in search of better customer service. To stay ahead of this trend, Central Group has introduced its Chat & Shop service. It’s a multi-channel digital assistant, accessible through social media channels, the Central app, and online stores. When Chat & Shop customers want to go shopping, but don’t have the time — the service offers a personalised service, suggesting products and services the customer may be interested in. The Chat & Shop team gets 10,000 to 20,000 contacts monthly, either through ads or via direct message. LIKE.TG technology has helped Central Group agents increase the conversion rate, closing more deals and offering suggestions for upselling and cross-selling. “LIKE.TG is very important in helping our customers and streamlining our processes. We can use our sales data across channels, and for customer segmentation. This is our plan to improve customer service,” said Khun Bank. There’s even more on the horizon. Finnomena is exploring how it can leverage Sales Cloud’s automated lead scoring capabilities to make its sales pipeline even more efficient. Finnomena is receiving as many as 400 new leads per day, says Khun Gigs. “We have a data team that analyses the data — that team is working on a lead-scoring model that will allow us to automatically prioritise the best of these 300–400 new leads,” he says. “We’ll use LIKE.TG to automate the referrals to the right sales advisors, which leaves our team more time to sell.” Employee happiness = customer happiness Back to that quote that we started this article with, when Khun Gigs said that “automation now is a must for all companies.” In our State of Service report we learned that 85% of service decision makers agreed that there was a direct link between employee experience and customer experience. One way of improving the employee experience is to ensure that they have the tools and information they need to serve the customer effectively and quickly. “It is not right to make your employees suffer with manual work when you have a lot of customers. Many tools are available now,” Khun Gigs continued. The good news is that high-performing organisations are already providing their teams with the tools and data they need. Eighty-eight percent of agents at high-performing service organisations agree that they have access to complete information about customers’ sales interactions.
4 Ways To Ensure Your Experience Metrics Stay Customer-Centric
Customer experience and service have shifted from being viewed as a cost-centre to a value-add for businesses. It’s much more cost-effective to retain existing customers than it is to acquire new ones. Service teams are central to creating the customer experiences that drive retention. A customer relationship management (CRM) system empowers service teams to deliver a compelling customer experience. Having a CRM that captures every touchpoint means service teams can fuel customer engagement, improve loyalty, and transform customers into advocates. LIKE.TG research shows 79% of executives across the Asia-Pacific agree that a CRM system is instrumental in delivering seamless customer experiences. Fifty percent of those surveyed said delivering outstanding customer experience over multiple channels of engagement is a top priority for the next 12 months. But your CRM should be viewed as always evolving. It is not set-and-forget or focused purely on vanity metrics. It’s essential that leaders measure the success of their CRM solutions against customer experience expectations. This will ensure that value is maximised, and that customer needs are truly at the heart of service delivery. Here are four tips for service leaders to keep in mind when they are measuring the success of CRM for service teams. 1. Take a customer-centric approach to agent productivity and speed of resolution The standard metrics of customer service agent productivity and efficiency are still important. But at the same time service teams are looking at how fast they can close a critical incident, so too can they focus on a holistic approach to the customer experience. As soon as the focus becomes just about hitting a certain call resolution time or a certain number of cases closed, then the organisation comes across as prioritising internal service KPIs over the customer. Knowledge articles, which are a core capability of Service Cloud, are critical to empowering service agents. With the relevant information immediately at hand, agents can get a quicker time to close with the best possible outcome for the customer. Workplace messaging system Slack is also a useful tool for working efficiently and keeping the customer front and centre. Integrated with Service Cloud, Slack enables a collaborative platform for service teams to access customer data. We use it for case swarming, whereby a case is elevated into a Slack case form and taps into the wisdom of the wider team to get a faster resolution. So, yes, measuring efficiency is important. But only as long as it’s done through the lens of customer experience. 2. Make your customer feedback count Customer engagement, loyalty, and advocacy are built on connected, seamless customer experience. Getting feedback about that experience is a powerful way to improve or to make necessary adjustments. How do you get feedback? One way is to ask for it with customer experience and satisfaction metrics like Net Promoter Score (NPS) and Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT). Another way is to make it a fully automated process in the service workflow so that each case concludes with a solicitation. Were you satisfied with your experience? How can we do better? That information is then gathered into your CRM for service dashboard so teams can track feedback. It’s important, however, to be mindful of the Cobra Effect when gathering quantitative data. This happens when you superficially meet a target, but in the process you undermine your larger goal. For example, a customer service officer might think, “If I hurry the interaction with this customer, then my turnaround time is quick and that will improve our efficiency KPIs”. Technically, they’re right. But the more important goal of creating positive customer experience gets undermined along the way. The Artificial Intelligence (AI) embedded in Service Cloud can help take measuring feedback to the next level by delivering more qualitative, nuanced data about customer sentiment. Whether it’s a fully digital encounter with a chatbot, or a personal encounter with a service agent, AI can uncover trends and analyse sentiment we couldn’t otherwise surface. It might, for example, pick out keywords like ‘disappointed’ or ‘frustrated’ that indicate a customer service response is needed. 3. Build a 360-degree customer view in your CRM with integration and collaboration With Service Cloud, businesses can eliminate the silos that have traditionally interrupted customer experience. Customers don’t want to feel like they’re dealing with disconnected departments. They want to engage with a single, unified organisation. For example, if a customer has an open service case, we can exclude them from a marketing audience so they are not targeted with the wrong messaging while their case is being addressed. This way, marketing and service are on the same page. It comes back to how CRM for service can deliver a 360-degree view of the customer. Every touchpoint, every communication, and every conversation is visible in real time to everyone in the organisation. No matter what channel a customer chooses to interact with you, the conversation can pick up from where they left off. A seamless, omni-channel experience can only occur when systems are integrated and teams collaborate. 4. Don’t make upselling just about selling Speaking of better integration between teams, upsell is a perfect example because it’s a shared metric. Service teams can place a customer into a marketing journey, or pass them directly on to a sales person. But upselling can be an extension of outstanding customer experience — not just pushing more products in order to meet sales targets. Upselling plays into the trust your customers have in the organisation. Service agents have an important role in nurturing that trust and in creating starting points for sales and marketing to introduce new campaigns to receptive customers. Just as customer experience is everyone’s job, so too does upselling depend on every department working together. Learn more about how a CRM for service can take customer experience to the next level. Watch the Service Cloud demo and try it for yourself.
4 Ways to Make AI the New Team Member Your Sales Reps Will Love
For many businesses, AI is like a new star recruit who everyone feels nervous around and cautious about. This is largely because of the myths that still persist about AI taking jobs, requiring employees to become data scientists and machine learning experts. And yet an AI-enabled sales strategy has the potential to enable sales professionals and drive performance. From sales analysis and forecasting to lead management, AI can help improve efficiency in the sales process. What AI needs then is a proper introduction, not a sudden announcement at a staff meeting or hastily circulated memo that makes sales — arguably one of the lively parts of any business — feel like it’s turning into a technical process rather than a valuable and talented team. The results can be damaging if those on the sales team fail to adopt or take advantage of the AI capabilities in their CRM, or try to find ways to work around it. So rather than letting your technology investment go to waste, it is beneficial to figure out an approach to AI onboarding that isn’t threatening. This can help integrate these sales or prospecting tools usefully and naturally into day-to-day work. 1. Build trust before the introduction If you were introducing a new team member to a client, would you bring them to a meeting unannounced? Would you simply tell everyone their name and expect the relationship to thrive? Probably not. Instead you would lay the groundwork — selling your new hire to the client before they ever meet. Similarly it can work better to lay the groundwork first instead of calling your sales team into a meeting to tell them AI is now part of their toolkit. Start by discussing the team’s own data and sales performance: win rates, losses, goals, and progress. These should be sales KPIs and numbers the team already trusts and values, so they’ll be sure to pay attention. Only then should you move the discussion into a business case about how AI sales tools might help improve those numbers. Develop your best sales forecast or estimate based on how AI could identify additional opportunities, avoid costly mistakes or predict otherwise unforeseen events. This positions AI as a sales tool useful to the team’s success — not something that will undermine their success. 2. It’s always a race — demonstrate AI’s time-saving benefits for sales reps Sales reps don’t love administrative work, whether it’s creating and submitting reports, scheduling meetings, answering emails or updating customer records. The reality is, admin work in the sales process also takes them away from the one thing they’re all good at and the very thing they earn commission on — selling. In fact, the average sales rep spends less than one-third of their time selling. It can really help if sales operations can show, not tell, your team how powerful reclaiming some of that time back would be. Most sales reps love a little competition — they thrive on achieving a goal! So set up a game with reps racing each other and the clock. Choose two competitive reps and give them a pile of data to input into a spreadsheet to create a sales report, and a number of emails to answer and correlate with calendar information to book meetings. Ask them to ensure they update customer records as they go. Use a stopwatch and give them 20 minutes to complete the task. Meanwhile, have a third rep complete the same task using Einstein GPT— you’ll need to make sure they’re familiar with using it. When time’s up, congratulate the sales rep who accomplished more of the tasks. But before declaring them the winner, talk about how AI can help improve sales management – by automating processes , updating your CRM and eliminating much of what we use spreadsheets for today. And ask the rep who was using AI what they would do with the extra time they didn’t spend on admin. The whole team will see for themselves that the right technology can free them up to do higher-value tasks and achieve sales growth. 3. Make AI the new member of your sales team When technology behaves like a person — hello Siri and Alexa — it feels less intimidating. So why not give your new AI capabilities the same advantage? Connect with your marketing department to develop a representative image you’ll use to associate with your new AI capabilities. Show the AI persona’s face on screen in your team meeting, and talk about them as though you are introducing a new admin assistant who will be helping out the team. Say you were launching an AI chatbot – introduce its persona like any other member of the team. Speak about the AI skills it offers, such as answering common customer questions and managing enquiries, at the same time freeing up the customer service staff to handle the more complex cases that require a human touch. The point is to demonstrate that if the AI were a high performer with exceptional capabilities, they would be enthusiastically welcomed. So why not do the same for the technology that can deliver those capabilities? 4. Transform your critics into advocates Getting the new technology’s harshest critics to pitch it can be a great way to turn a sceptic into a fully-fledged AI advocate. Salespeople thrive on competition and on coming up with ingenious ways to convince even the most resistant customers. You can turn that to your advantage as you bring in AI. After walking through your business case and demonstrating AI’s ability to supercharge CRM, challenge members of the team to do an on-the-spot pitch as though they needed to convince the company to try the technology out. Offer a real prize for the rep who delivers the most convincing pitch, and maybe add bonus points for those who would characterise themselves as uneasy or doubtful about AI’s abilities. It’s a useful technique to help the team get comfortable with the benefits of AI features in their CRM and can turn sceptics into fans. Getting fully comfortable with a new team member can take time. But when that new team member is AI, it’s worth putting effort into introducing and onboarding it with an awareness of your sales team’s potential reluctance and a creative approach to overcoming it.
5 Accurate Sales Forecasting Techniques for Predictable Revenue
Sales leaders rely on forecasting techniques to achieve consistent revenue growth year on year. But sales forecasting can also help in making critical business decisions to set the course for this growth – from staffing and budgeting to resource investment, and future earnings. Sales leaders spend hundreds of hours thinking about sales forecasting techniques that lead toward predictable revenue and accurate, actionable data. The best sales forecasting techniques usually answer two simple questions: How much do we plan to sell? And when will we deliver those numbers? As sales teams work on forecasts , unpredictable events can dramatically change them. But there are reliable techniques to help to navigate these changes. Here are 5 ways to start taking a more strategic approach to your forecasting challenges. 1. Be ready for your forecast to change in a flash Economic uncertainty and unforeseen challenges can dramatically change your forecast. What you thought you knew about expected revenue growth can suddenly start looking very different. When that happens, it’s okay to put your forecast aside. First and foremost, sales leaders and reps can focus on showing empathy and nurturing relationships with one another as well as with customers. By maintaining customer relationships in times of uncertainty, those relationships will help you grow again when the outlook improves. Though forecasting is tough in uncertain environments, it’s also important to review and revise as needed. The forecast is a critical resource to plan for the months and years ahead. As soon as an extraordinary event hits, sales and finance leaders at your company will quickly want to know: How is your pipeline looking today? What are the best- and worst-case scenarios? How has the forecast changed from a week or a month ago? It can really help to analyse this data by region, leader, rep, product, and more. To make this possible, reps need to have a stronger focus on keeping all their data up to date. This is easy with tools like Sales Cloud’s built-in Pipeline Inspection. On one screen, you can easily filter opportunities by team or time period and see the most recent activity. This helps your team know what’s happening now, what’s likely to happen next, and what data is missing. 2. Use these five simple questions to build forecasts Before your sales forecasts can appropriately predict ‘how much’ and ‘when’, there are five important areas to consider: who, what, where, why, and how. Here are a few key questions to help your sales teams build their forecasts: Who? Sales teams make forecasts based on their prospects. Depending whether the prospects are the decision makers or just influencers, the forecast will be more or less exact. What? Forecasts should be based on exactly what solutions you plan to sell. Base them on problems your prospects have voiced, which your company can uniquely solve. Where? In what location is the prospect making their buying decision, and where will they use the actual products? Sales teams see better accuracy when they get closer (at least for a visit) to the centre of the action. Why? Why is the prospect or existing customer considering new services? Is there a big event making them consider it now? Without a compelling reason, the deal may stall. How? How does this prospect make purchasing decisions? Taking into account how they’ve done it in the past can offer useful insights. Some of these items are easier to get an understanding of than others. But it’s important to keep adjusting the data based on what’s happening in the field. A high-pressure scenario is not the time to give up on your forecast. Some of these elements are plain facts, while others can involve speculation, without having all the information you need. The more you sell, the better you get at forecasts. That’s why it’s a balance of both art and science. 3. Use negative forecasting to highlight business risk You can also use your forecast to assess current risk to your business – also called ‘negative forecasting’. For example, when a customer added a COVID-19 field in Sales Cloud to tag deals and see pandemic impact, they realised two key benefits: The sales team could expedite deals involving a customer needing a product related to COVID-19. The company could track deals lost or pushed due to the pandemic. By doing negative forecasting to assess risk, your forecast can evolve with your business. 4. Create sales forecasts the entire company will use – not just the sales team Every department relies on sales forecasts, because there isn’t a part of the organisation that is not affected when forecasts are off. Sales forecasts help the entire business plan to ship products, pay for marketing, and hire employees. With accurate forecasts, a company can make better investments, like hiring new developers or opening a new sales office in a prime location. But if forecasts are off, the company can face challenges not only in sales management but across all business functions – from pricing to product delivery, to customer service. Everyone relies on the sales organisation’s ability to pull off an accurate forecast. So don’t underestimate the importance of your forecast. Even when things change rapidly, tweak your guidance to help everyone make informed decisions. 5. Make technology the foundation of your sales forecasting techniques Traditional methods of making predictions can’t compare to today’s sales forecasting tech. This is making sales operations look at very sophisticated and accurate tools to help sales leaders make better forecasting decisions. In LIKE.TG’s own internal deployment of Sales Cloud, we forecast revenue by: Monitoring our entire business with a complete view of the total pipeline. Tracking our top performers. We look at which reps are on track to beat their targets with up-to-the-minute leaderboards. Forecasting for complex sales teams. Overlay Splits allows us to credit the right amounts to sales overlays by revenue, contract value, and more. We also use artificial intelligence (also known as predictive analytics) to make our forecasts more accurate and our sales teams more efficient and productive. For instance, Sales Cloud Einstein Conversation Insights can track mentions of specific terms during sales calls, then map out trends. This helps managers reconfigure sales strategies to deliver the right products in the right way to prospects and customers. A good sales forecasting technique helps you make better decisions about the future and plan for sales growth. Should you prepare for an uncertain period ahead? Or will it be a favourable time to keep driving revenue growth? Our blueprint for sales leaders shows how the right tools can help you predict, plan, grow and succeed. Get the blueprint to becoming a forecasting pro. Join us at LIKE.TG World Tour Essentials Asia and learn how LIKE.TG Customer 360 can help to unlock the value of your customer data. Register now This post originally appeared on the US version of the LIKE.TG blog.
5 Business Uses for an AI Copilot
Get ready, world: AI assistants may become your new business BFF. Imagine writing an email in 20 seconds instead of 20 minutes, completing hours of research in minutes, or automatically receiving a full summary of a customer’s service history.These timesavers demonstrate the power of an AI assistant, or copilot. It’s the next level of innovation within generative artificial intelligence (AI) technology, where you simply tell a assistant what to do for you, right in the flow of your work. While hundreds of millions have flocked to AI platforms over the past year, an AI assistant takes them to a whole new level. You won’t find this assistant on a website. It shows up as a conversational AI interface integrated with your everyday workflow, whether it’s a customer relationship management (CRM), email, or other system specific to your industry. An assistant makes you more productive by doing work on your behalf. The best part? You just tell it, in plain language, what you want it to do and it does it for you. The technology is now being applied across sales, service, marketing, retail, and many other industries and roles. If you’re a knowledge worker (that is, anyone who works with information), an AI copilot is for you. A report by the Oliver Wyman Forum found 55% of global workers are already using generative AI at least once a week, but the expected productivity gains have been lacking. The turning point, however, is coming as generative AI integrates into daily workflows. That, the report predicts, will propel massive productivity gains to the tune of 300 billion hours saved annually by 2030. So, how do these productivity workhorses get the job done? Just like the major AI platforms, AI assistants use large language models (LLMs) to parse immense amounts of data in seconds. But they take the outputs further by performing tasks on your behalf. Given their unprecedented functionality, AI assistants are expected to transform every business function. Many companies are jumping in as early adopters. You might be thinking, “How could I use an AI copilot at work?” To help answer this, we’ll break down the most common ways to use AI assistants at work, as well as look at how companies are planning ahead with this technology in mind. AI assistants for salespeople Andrew Russo, enterprise architect at Baca Systems, an industrial equipment supplier, envisions many ways of using an AI assistant. First up: sales emails.“We found that salespeople spend up to 20 minutes writing one custom email to a customer,” he said. “Being able to dish out more emails would be a high-value thing for us.” Picture your sales and marketing teams equipped with an AI in CRM assistant that drafts individualised emails, customised with the information that will resonate with each audience. These aren’t run-of-the-mill, generic messages. Generative AI can use CRM information about past interactions, or automatically segment your audience to create emails with a personalised feel that can dramatically increase engagement rates. Salespeople can also use an assistant to prioritise. Imagine starting your day by asking your computer to give you the top three sales leads. An assistant can do that, and also provide context. Why is the customer a good prospect? Generative AI can flag recent news from the company indicating, for example, that it plans to invest in new markets or expand its product portfolio. Once you’ve contacted a lead, an AI assistant can support you by summarising conversations and highlighting customer needs, preferences, and all commitments made. It can also create complete sales summaries by merging call details with broader account information and historical data. Don’t know how to move a deal forward? An AI assistant can review contacts, recent emails, calls, and customer meetings, and recommend next-best actions. For example, if a customer’s decision-makers are ready to buy, the assistant might recommend the right time to send them detailed information about your products and services. The assistant can even suggest optimal meeting times, based on the customer’s known preferences. Then, it can: Generate a suggested task list. Draft an email to decision-makers, which you can review before sending. Mark the deal as closed and update the opportunity, including the sales amount. This kind of end-to-end support represents what’s possible when your AI assistants has access to all the data in your organisation. While many companies have different sets of data siloed in different departments, those who can bring different types of information from different sources into one organised system will reap the full benefits of AI copilots. AI assistant for service teams If you work in customer service — or have ever interacted with a service department — you know chatbots aren’t anything new. With an AI assistant, though, you supercharge an agent’s ability to resolve problems. AI assistants can often gather the most relevant information about a customer, in real time, to help agents resolve cases faster, freeing them up to troubleshoot more complex problems. Consider this scenario: A customer says they were overbilled for their monthly internet expense. In this case, the agent simply asks its assistant to: Retrieve the relevant billing information based on the date range provided by the customer. Get the purchase order and contract terms for the subscription. Compare how much higher this time period’s bill is compared to the same time period last year. Gather product usage information and analyse whether the usage has increased. Find out if pricing or contract terms have changed. Create a proposal for how to address the issue. In the past, gathering this information would require an agent to access several different systems or departments. That takes lots of time and, in many cases, frustrates the customer and the agent. AI assistants for self-service customers The verdict is in: Customers prefer to not call you for routine questions. LIKE.TG research shows 57% of customers prefer to deal with companies through digital channels, like text and chat, for simple issues like checking order status or changing a mailing address. How can an AI assistant make these interactions better? Instead of providing links to help customers complete a task, the way many chatbots currently do, an AI assistant can serve up personalised data that draws from your information bank (also known as a knowledge base), customer data, and other sources. This gives self-service systems much more depth, with conversational abilities that are more like a human-to-human conversation. Because the assistant is pulling data from across your organisation, it can answer questions about orders (When will it arrive? Can you change the shipping address?) and specific customer account data (When is my next payment due?). It can also take actions that previously required a human, like closing an account or mailing a replacement card. AI assistants for retailers Product recommendation engines have been used by brands for years, but they lack the granularity and personalisation that customers expect. An AI assistant changes the game. Now, a customer can enter a simple prompt like “show me short-sleeved pink dresses I can wear to a June wedding” on a retailer’s website and get relevant choices. In the background, the AI assistant is using its knowledge of natural-language prompts to quickly return the best results to the shopper. In this way, an AI assistant can act as a digital concierge, helping the customer discover the perfect product, with minimal hassle. Assuming the customer is a known shopper, the assistant would use the customer’s profile to understand their intent, and make recommendations based on past purchases, affinities, and service records. For example, it wouldn’t bother recommending a product similar to something the customer has returned in the past.AI assistants are also a game-changer for retail teams. They can automate complex tasks like managing multiproduct catalogue data and personalising product promotions, simply by telling the assistant to perform those tasks. They can also craft product descriptions based on historical data that shows what copy has converted well in the past, as well as write product descriptions in multiple languages. The most recent State of Commerce report found that, while AI adoption is nascent in retail organisations, early adopters are saving an average of 6.4 hours per week. Retail marketers, for example, can save loads of time by asking their assistant to create a targeted promotion for, say, hiking boots for loyalty program members. AI assistants for marketers Marketing teams spend lots of time analysing trends, understanding customer preferences, developing segmentation strategies, and establishing competitive positioning. They’re also deeply invested in content creation to personalise their messaging Imagine if a trusted assistant could do that work for you. You can ask your AI helper to: Closely analyse historical customer data to identify narrower segments, and tailor marketing messages on a more personal level. Write marketing copy unique to each customer segment. Track and understand how your customer is engaging with you at every step of the relationship – then suggest next-best actions. Use existing customer data to infer which topics and channels customers prefer, and then personalise the products, articles, and other information they’ll see there. Understand how customers prefer to receive communications and what they’re interested in, and prioritise those message types and relevant content. AI assistants = smarter workdays for everyone AI can already automate repetitive tasks, process and analyse large volumes of data quickly, and help you make data-driven decisions across any department. Now, with AI assistants, we’re at a productivity inflection point similar to how PCs revolutionised the way people tackle business tasks and communicate. The breakthrough now is twofold: Business users can ask their AI assistant for what they want. The assistant goes to work in the background, provides an answer in seconds, and takes action accordingly. This is the kind of futuristic, “I can’t imagine that ever being possible” stuff from “The Jetsons.” With the right protocol and prompt systems in play, the split-second answers you get from your assistant are grounded in business data from across your organisation, not just a sales, marketing, or customer service system. Actions built for assistant have access to all this business data, plus data that previously couldn’t be analysed like PDFs, web pages, and emails. AI assistants are “a really a big shift from the idea of people thinking we’re going to automate them out of a job to showing them that we’re helping them close more deals and serve customers better,” said Russo. It’s not just about speeding up the usual mundane tasks. It’s about redefining what you can achieve in a day’s work.
5 Customer Service Trends You Need to Watch
As technology advances, the state of customer service changes along with it. Customers expect companies to adapt to their needs, and technologies like generative AI are playing a major role in meeting those evolving expectations. Here are five customer service trends to keep on your radar as you prepare for the future of customer service, based on new data from the “State of Service” report.1. Service organisations are now revenue generators — not cost centresCompanies are looking for new ways to drive growth and protect their margins, and many see service as a prime opportunity. In fact, 85% of decision makers say service is expected to contribute a larger share of revenue this year. So how can you take action? Our research shows that leading organisations are actively tracking key performance indicators (KPIs) that are linked to tangible business outcomes. In fact, the share of service organisations tracking revenue generation has nearly doubled since 2018, from 51% to an astonishing 91%. The share tracking customer retention rose by 29 percentage points over the same period. If those customer service analytics aren’t already on your radar, it’s time to make some changes — otherwise you risk getting left behind. (back to top)2. Self-service is a clear competitive advantageSelf-service helps customers resolve simple issues, freeing agents to spend more time on high-complexity, high-value interactions. Our latest research shows that high-performing organisations are much more likely than underperformers to provide self-service tools like knowledge-powered help centres, customer self-service portals, and chatbots powered by AI. When customers can interact with a chatbot to answer a question or use a guided journey to start a return, live agents have the time they need to manage more complicated requests. That’s critically important for the 69% of agents who report difficulty balancing speed and quality. (back to top)3. Connected data enables a better customer experienceMany organisations keep data in different silos or applications, so it’s difficult to get a complete view of the customer across all channels. Bringing customer data together is all about creating an end-to-end view of the entire customer journey. This way, you’ll have a continuous feedback loop between sales, service, and marketing, keeping everyone on the same page. Maybe that’s why 82% of high-performing organisations use the same customer relationship management (CRM) platform across all departments — up from 62% just two years ago.The stakes are high: 92% of analytics and IT leaders say the need for trustworthy data is greater than ever. That’s why privacy, security, and trust have already become a major competitive advantage in the evolving AI landscape. As companies try to stay one step ahead of these and other customer service trends, leading organisations are adopting programs that prevent large-language models (LLMs) from retaining sensitive customer data. More organisations are training their own domain-specific models to access a secure AI cloud while storing data on their own infrastructure. These efforts are essential to preserving customers’ loyalty and trust in the years to come. (back to top)4. Conversational AI is taking proactive, personalised service to the next levelWhen it comes to meeting customers’ sky-high expectations, proactive service is more important than ever. “It’s essential to proactively resolve issues before they have any significant business impact,” says Jules O’Donnell, LIKE.TG administration manager at Quickbase. “This means keeping up with technology solutions to scale service and meet customers where they are.” Our latest research backs that up: 95% of decision makers at organisations with AI report cost and time savings, and 92% say generative AI helps them deliver better customer service. It should come as no surprise, then, that 83% of decision makers plan to increase their AI investment over the next year, while only 6% say they have no plans for the technology whatsoever. The introduction of conversational AI assistants is one of the innovations that’s making these benefits possible. From the contact centre to the field, AI assistants surface the right information at the right time to enable proactive service, improve Net Promoter Scores, and increase loyalty. Here’s what that looks like in practice: Responding to customers with personalised, relevant answers grounded in trusted company knowledge across any preferred channel — including email, SMS, live chat, and social media Resolving customer issues faster using generative answers seamlessly integrated into agents’ and technicians’ flow of workAutonomously completing tasks like auto-summarising intricate support cases and field work orders (back to top)5. AI is improving productivity and safety in the fieldOur research shows that mobile workers say innovative field service technologies make them feel safer and more effective at their jobs, empowering them to be better brand ambassadors. These technologies include intelligent scheduling, route optimisation, AI-generated reports, and augmented reality (which can create detailed 3D rendering of large areas in seconds). One of the emerging benefits of these and other technologies is the ability to generate insights and predict job duration. For example, workers can use AI to easily view asset condition as well as maintenance and repair history, then schedule proactive service to minimise downtime. Customers are benefiting, too. They can book and reschedule their own appointments using intelligent appointment assistance. And many customers have the ability to check when a technician is on the way, reducing no-shows and call volume for a better customer experience all around. (back to top)Staying one step ahead of customer service trendsA great strategy starts with the right questions. How can you pursue innovation while maintaining the integrity of your data? How do you build customers’ loyalty and trust? And what’s the secret to delivering faster, more effective customer service without breaking the bank? The right technologies can help you prepare for the future while keeping up with the latest customer service trends. That’s why your organisation must combine people, technology, and processes to deliver faster, more effective service at scale — with AI assisting you every step of the way. (back to top)
5 Essential Sales Manager Skills for Success
As a sales manager, your job is to provide your salespeople with the tools, information, and support they need to close deals and grow revenue. You also want to help your reps develop meaningful careers. They can’t do it alone — and neither can you.If you’ve recently been promoted to a sales manager role — or are looking to brush up on your leadership skills to earn that next promotion — consider these five essential sales management skills to help you create a successful sales team. By honing these skills, your team will better understand how to build strong customer relationships and close deals. Every sales manager needs to be able to:Hire and retain the right sales teamFocus on performance managementLearn how to coach effectivelyKnow their numbersRethink their approach to leadershipAdditionally, mastering communication skills is crucial for building strong customer relationships, leading sales teams effectively, and conveying information across various business scenarios.Click image to view in a new browser window1. Hire and retain the right sales team understanding sales manager responsibilitiesGood to Great author Jim Collins wrote, “The most important decisions that business people make are not what decisions, but who decisions.” For sales managers, recruiting a successful sales manager may well be the most important thing you do. And yet, since most sales managers don’t hire on a daily or weekly basis, it can be challenging to create an effective sales hiring process.The best salespeople can earn your company big money, but they can be hard to find — and even harder to keep. One study found that the average turnover rate for sales positions is 39 per cent. In a world where four out of every 10 new hires won’t stay with your company, hiring isn’t just about snagging the best salespeople, but retaining them, too.After all, a great sales manager at your business likely invests thousands of dollars for each new recruit. You pay to train them, and then wait for them to learn enough to start making valuable sales. No sales manager wants to put in the time and effort just to start the process all over again.That’s why successful sales managers must try to hire the right people from the start. Here are some tips to get going:Create an ideal candidate profile before you hire. Building your team goes best when you know what you want the end results to be before you even begin. Outline the skills, experience profiles, and characteristics that will fit best with your team, now and into the future. Organise your job description around these characteristics, and screen for them as you interview. Specifically, crafting a detailed sales manager job description that outlines responsibilities and qualifications is crucial. This helps in attracting and retaining skilled sales reps by ensuring they understand their role in overseeing the sales team, setting objectives, and driving revenue growth.Remember that degrees and experience are only part of the equation. Expand your evaluation beyond the resume to screen for more elusive soft skills, like executive communication and relationship-building abilities, as well as sales skills, like logical analysis and the ability to learn a new business.Highlight your business as a desirable employer. When a great candidate is sitting in front of you, often the evaluation is going both ways. That’s your cue to sing the praises of your employer and to dig into anything the candidate wants to know. Share information about benefits, company culture, and opportunities for growth. Seek to understand what motivates these candidates, speak to their passions and their dreams, and tell them why you’ll help them do the best work of their careers.Go beyond the job boards. Your next top salesperson is probably busy closing deals, not scouring job boards. So open other avenues in parallel, like recruiter channels, events, and word-of-mouth referrals. Critically, increasing diversity in your sourcing will also increase diversity in your team. Check out more tips to diversify your candidate pool.When people do move on from your team, another important sales manager skill is the ability to perform an empathetic exit interview. These meetings with sales teams will help you understand why they are leaving, how satisfied they were, and what you can do better.2. Focus on performance managementAs a sales manager, sales performance and management is at the heart of your job. Sales managers are responsible for supporting their salespeople with goals, coaching, and resources while maintaining an authentic interest in their personal growth. Performance management is what makes this growth happen. Developing and implementing effective sales strategies is crucial to achieving sales performance and management goals.Berkeley experts recommend taking a three-pronged approach to performance management:Plan: Collaborate with your salespeople to create expectations around performance and tailor individual growth goals to their strengths and business objectives. Outline these goals in a plan together with specific areas for improvement, actionable steps for achieving desired results, and a timeline for when it all should happen.Check-in: Schedule performance conversations where you and your salespeople discuss what steps have been taken and how performance has been affected.Review: Following the timeline, review performance against the plan, and talk about factors that may have affected the results. Discuss what went well and what didn’t, and create new objectives for the next performance management cycle.Employees crave ongoing feedback, so don’t wait for official reviews before you discuss performance. Instead, build trust-based relationships with your team that provide solid ground for meaningful and regular check-ins throughout the year. Make sure coaching plans include regular training on digital sales tools, too.Performance conversations with sales leaders are a crucial area where employee experience and business results overlap. Like all employees, salespeople want to have good relationships with their managers and seek opportunities for development. Listen carefully to what they have to say; these are dialogues, not monologues.Performance management is what you’re doing. Coaching effectively is how you do it. See the next section for more details on that.3. Learn how to coach effectivelyEffective salespeople aren’t born. They’re created through experience, intensive training, and effective sales coaching, often from great sales managers, who make it a point to help their team members succeed.Sales training traditionally focuses on sales methodologies and product knowledge. In contrast, and just as important, sales coaching is encouraging behaviours that drive long-term success among your sales team members themselves.To be successful as a sales manager, evaluate each member of your sales leadership team as an individual and determine how coaching can help them grow as a salesperson. Get started with these seven steps:Build trust. No rep will take your advice unless they trust you. Don’t offer hot takes on their performance right out of the gate. Take time to observe how they work holistically before offering ideas for improvement.Ask effective questions. Why do they approach their work the way they do? What motivates them? These questions will help you understand their motivation for better results.Encourage self-evaluation. Making suggestions as their manager is great, but what’s even better is helping reps cultivate their own self-awareness. That way they can see issues and resolve them independently.Focus on one area of improvement at a time. No one wants to hear that they need to improve in 10 areas. Start small.Listen as much as you speak. The rep should co-lead any performance discussions alongside you. If you find yourself talking much more than the rep, that could mean you’re not listening enough.Develop a plan of action with your rep. Share, don’t mandate, the roadmap to better performance.Hold the rep accountable. Ask about their progress monthly or more frequently, depending on the relationship and coaching needs.Once you better understand each person’s needs and potential, you’ll be better suited to create a dynamic coaching plan designed for their individual strengths and weaknesses.Click image to view in a new browser window4. Know the numbersAs a sales manager, numbers will be your new best friend. Which numbers? Analytics on how the business is performing. This data will illuminate areas that need extra sales attention so you can pass down advice to reps.If you’re a newly promoted sales manager, think about this as the shift from flawless sales execution to being a numbers-driven coach. Consider these two key areas for revenue growth and focus:Look for the story behind the numbers: Financial reports often don’t provide context for numbers. For example, how does a 25 per cent increase in sales impact quarterly earnings? If one region suddenly saw a dramatic surge in sales, did they also invest significantly in new hires a quarter before? Knowing the data won’t help you if you don’t know what the numbers truly mean. Analysing these numbers can help in refining your sales strategy, enabling you to better meet sales targets and improve overall sales performance by planning and implementing effective strategies and overseeing sales teams more efficiently.Expand outside of sales: Look beyond sales-specific numbers. How is marketing performing? What about customer service? Knowledge of company performance across the full customer lifecycle will give you a better understanding of where sales fits in. Then you can better guide your team.5. Rethink your approach to leadershipSome managers confuse leadership with power. Being an effective sales team leader means understanding your true role as a leader. Sometimes a leader isn’t the loudest person in the room. Sometimes being a leader means active listening, or pitching in on some not-so-glamorous duties if a team member is unexpectedly away.As a good sales manager does, your true purpose is to empower your team and provide them with the tools and resources they need to succeed. This means ensuring they understand where their strengths lie and helping them improve areas of weakness. Your sales manager skills will get better the longer you do the job. It’s a multifaceted role, and when it’s done well, everyone benefits.Next stepsGetting promoted is exciting. Just when you feel like you’ve mastered your domain, you rise to a new place, a beginner once again. Only now you have more responsibility than ever.The call of the sales manager is to become a leader. Instead of solely focusing on making sales, your sales management role has expanded to support and lead those who are making the majority of the sales.The sales manager skills list in this article will help you help your team become top performers. It won’t happen overnight: Take the time to study, adapt, and adjust your approach as you learn more about what works for you, your team members, your sales manager responsibilities and your company.For more insight on sales targets and what it takes to boost sales productivity on your team, download our guide.
5 IT Challenges and How To Overcome Them With MuleSoft
MuleSoft has been part of the LIKE.TG family for over three years. It helps organisations innovate faster by making it easy to connect any application, data source, or device. It does this with Application Programming Interfaces (APIs). Nearly 90% of business and IT leaders agree that the role of IT has become more important in the last 12 months. Priorities for the coming year will be dominated by enhancing operational efficiency, creating better connected customer experiences, and improving productivity. The last two years have seen a remarkable acceleration in digital transformation. There have been rapid changes in customer expectations, and seismic shifts in the ways that organisations and their employees work. There are many barriers to becoming a more effective digital organisation. Here are five of them, and how you can overcome them with MuleSoft: Integrate legacy data and siloed information Over two-thirds of organisations have said they find it hard to make changes due to legacy IT. That challenge is even bigger for healthcare (76%), insurance (72%), and public sector (74%) organisations. When it comes to the public sector, 95% say it’s difficult to modernise their legacy IT systems without disrupting mission-critical processes. In an attempt to overcome these challenges, many organisations are operating in what Siddharth Rastogi, VP LIKE.TG/MuleSoft South East Asia, calls a “swivel-chair type of model”. “Imagine an agent who (swivels) across multiple data sources to respond to a customer,” explains Rastogi. “They are trying to gather all the information in one view so they can engage with the customer. The problem is that much of that information may be locked in legacy systems and spread across silos.” With MuleSoft, the “swivel” stops. Data can be extracted from any application or system with APIs and unify data to deliver a single, 360-degree view of the customer. Also, data can be integrated without disrupting mission-critical processes. “This has been a common challenge for organisations that are building new services or products while wanting to keep their usual engines running,” says Rastogi. “The nature of MuleSoft means those everyday activities can continue in a secure and sustainable fashion. At the same time, organisations can experiment with new products and services separately. These functions can happen simultaneously.” Drive greater productivity MuleSoft research shows the need for greater productivity is the driving factor behind why organisations align their IT teams and business teams. Nearly all organisations surveyed implement automation initiatives to improve productivity. However, 79% of IT decision makers say that integration challenges are holding them back from improved operational efficiency. “Part of what makes MuleSoft so powerful when it comes to productivity,” says Rastogi, “is the notion of a composable enterprise. This means an enterprise can break down its data and functionality into building blocks that can then be reused to make new capabilities. “These building blocks can be found again in the future. You can then reuse any number of these blocks to make something new. This notion of discoverability and reuse is fundamental to MuleSoft’s model. “Imagine you’ve built your first project from scratch. Then you go to your second project and use some of the building blocks from project one. By the time you get to project three and four, the amount you have to make from scratch is becoming smaller. This cuts out a lot of development work and provides a massive bump in productivity.” Integrate data for improved customer experience Sixty-five percent of customers say that they often have to repeat information to different parts of the same business. More than half say that it often feels like they are talking to different organisations. However, 54% of organisations that have better alignment between their IT and business teams have reported an improvement in customer experience. MuleSoft can be a powerful enabler of that critical alignment. “The goal for any organisation, whatever industry it’s in, is to provide an Amazon-like experience for the customer. The organisation knows and understands the customer and their preferences. They understand where the customer is, and what they want to buy, and can bring all of that together in one seamless experience,” says Rastogi. To provide that truly connected customer experience, the organisation must access information both internally and externally and connect it in real time. MuleSoft makes that possible. For example, a customer might have a conversation with one part of the organisation in one week and then another interaction with a different part of the organisation the following week. Often, it’s not until much later that the organisation connects these two interactions. MuleSoft integrates those silos in real time, and agents get an up-to-date picture of all the interactions their customer has had with the organisation. Keep integrated data secure Seventy-three percent of IT and business decision makers globally say the integration of disconnected systems causes concerns around security and governance. Added to that, 87% of business and IT leaders agree that concerns around security and governance worries also affect their pace of innovation. This is particularly true when non-technical users are working on integrations. These are concerns MuleSoft can address with what Rastogi describes as a modern API-led approach. “This means that each of those ‘building blocks’ is wrapped in a security layer managed by the MuleSoft Anypoint Platform.” MuleSoft can apply security policies right down to the single API level. “We have industry-standard security policies applied across both clusters of APIs and individual APIs,” says Rastogi. Plug the IT delivery gap IT teams have been asked to deliver on 30% more projects this year, while their budgets have only grown by around 6%. This is an ongoing trend, and has led to an IT delivery gap at a time when organisations are relying on their IT teams for survival. As Rastogi explains, it’s a challenge that can be met by MuleSoft’s reuse element. “You’re essentially getting more output for the same input because you’re reusing a lot of elements instead of always developing from scratch.” One of the benefits of MuleSoft is that it can bring about organisational change. This helps IT teams who may be feeling the strain of shrinking budgets. “Traditionally, IT is where the bottleneck of requests builds up,” says Rastogi. “But with MuleSoft, simpler processes become accessible to business users, not just IT users. That means IT teams can focus on core elements that need deep technology, integration, security, and governance.” “MuleSoft Composer puts integration capabilities into the hands of actual business users. They don’t need to have technical expertise. Instead, they can use the drag-and-drop interface to create automated flows.” MuleSoft is also key to enabling innovation. Instead of working on a small handful of expensive projects, organisations can experiment faster and at a lower cost with MuleSoft’s cloud-based model. “If the experiment is successful,” says Rastogi, “then the organisation can scale it. If not, it can be trashed with little cost. With MuleSoft, organisations can afford to experiment and innovate more.” To find out how to make your business more agile, more efficient, and more connected, read about MuleSoft.
5 Key Behavioural Elements that Build Successful Data Cultures
Dreamforce is the crown jewel of the LIKE.TG event universe — and it was epic. From amazing keynote sessions to demos showcasing the tools to solve your biggest challenges, Dreamforce had something for everyone (including the very best swag!). But are you ready for the understatement of the year? That’s right – AI pretty much stole the show. From generating hyper-relevant sales emails to prospects to anticipating a customer service issue with a VIP, AI is here to serve and support every aspect of the business.Here’s the thing: it’s IT that enables everyone else to leverage AI.As an IT leader, you’re already feeling the pressure to pivot to an AI-led approach across your organization. But you’re faced with the harsh reality of connecting and harmonizing your data while adhering to security and data governance standards? How can you build AI-powered applications that you can trust? And how can you do it now? AI for IT: 3 launches you can use Let’s take a look at how these new AI launches, all announced at Dreamforce 2023, are helping IT teams get more done – and how you can, too! 1. Unlock the full power of your data According to our latest State of IT report, 86% of IT decision-makers worldwide believe that generative AI will play a significant role in their organizations in the near future.However, the average organization reported more than 1000 distinct applications used across the enterprise. Scarier still, fewer than a third of these apps are integrated. This is a problem when AI depends on accurate, unified data to deliver critical insights and predictions. In MuleSoft’s 2023 Connectivity Benchmark Report, enterprise IT leaders estimated spending an average of $4.7 million per year on custom integration efforts. That’s an increase of 31% from their 2022 estimate of $3.6 million. With this in mind, it’s critical to have the right tools and development environments at the ready to implement and build the experiences customers expect. All of this with security and powerful generative AI capabilities built right in. One way to get connected quickly is with MuleSoft, loaded with new generative AI capabilities to make integration faster than ever before. Connect to any data or system, wherever it resides, with security and governance built in. The MuleSoft Accelerator for Data Cloud can help you unlock and connect to critical industry systems quickly and securely. Once unlocked, your teams can finally harmonize with existing data sources through the power of LIKE.TG Data Cloud. This enables you to get a unified view of every customer so that you can deliver the right experiences at the right time every time.Harmonizing data quickly? That’s music to our ears. Get IT articles selected just for you, in your inbox Sign up now 2. Put your data to work If your teams have tackled the data unification challenge — bravo! After all, it’s these integration challenges that slow down digital transformation initiatives for 80% of IT teams. But it’s actually garnering insights and getting recommendations from AI that IT leaders are being pressured to deliver. With unified data in place, how can we start to see the benefits of AI? Well, IT teams can make the building of apps and automations a bit easier with Prompt Builder.Because every generative AI-powered CRM app depends on the quality of the AI prompt, it’s useful to get a boost with the provided prompt templates. These templates guide IT teams in building AI prompts that will root the AI in specific data and instructions — making it possible for the AI to deliver better suggestions more quickly. This low-code prompt management tool allows IT teams to build, test, and fine-tune trusted AI prompts within the Einstein Trust Layer. Any sensitive data is automatically masked to limit bias and toxicity. With this tool, IT teams can leverage AI to build everything from auto-generated emails to product descriptions for websites. This means freeing up time to focus on deeper, more sophisticated IT challenges. Low-code. Painless. That’s how AI should be. 3. Deploy safely and quickly With a tremendous amount of pressure to consistently deliver new solutions, IT leaders must balance speed and delivery with security.We know all too well what can happen when an organization skirts security concerns to increase deployment speed. According to our recent State of the Connected Customer Report, the average cost of not complying with data protection regulations is $14.8 million. That’s a lot, and we want to work toward avoiding any data breaches.One thing AI can help with is mitigating security concerns without compromising on deployment speed. By using secure development environments with sandboxes, IT teams can safely test AI processes without the risk of pushing any errors to the production org.Plus, sandboxes are also a great space to train teams on how to responsibly build code with the help of generative AI.When it comes to production environments, a new feature will help protect your sensitive data and stay compliant. Privacy Center will feature new data management policies where IT teams can delete stale data or de-identify at scale to protect the production org.But if something were to go awry, we’ve got you covered there, too. LIKE.TG Backup is a native solution that allows you to protect against corruption, data loss, or coding errors by providing daily backups and the ability to restore quickly.Delivering new solutions with peace of mind. Sounds peaceful. Don’t sleep on AI What’s top-of-mind for IT leaders is how to get the most out of AI — now. That starts with the right tools to pull together your data with security and governance built-in. Leading IT organizations are already transforming to accommodate the latest AI trends. Make sure you’re one of them.
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