Sales professionals excel at customer communications and articulating why products and services would solve common consumer problems. To optimize their sales, businesses may want to figure out how they can provide their customers with the most value through every sales interaction and increase their conversion rates at the same time. Companies should consider tracking how well sales representatives interact with and connect with customers through sales effectiveness metrics to make sure their staff offer the most value to customers.
When thinking about how to best serve their customers, companies should utilize their sales staff’s abilities to solve customers’ business challenges. To do this, companies should consider dividing their target customers into certain segments. Profiling and segmentation that targets customers through their demographics and other key characteristics will help sales professionals hone in on the factors that go into customers’ purchasing behavior.
Through asking themselves what is driving consumers to make their purchases, sales representatives are one step closer to determining how to connect their companies’ solutions to their customers needs.
In addition to considering how much value they are providing to customers, companies should calculate the value their customers offer them, ensuring they are boost their revenue in the short-term and long-run.
How to determine customer value
Companies may want to use sales analytics to determine the value of their customers. They could use metrics to track customer value and revenue such as customer life-time value (CLV) or customer equity, according to a report in Journal of Retailing by a team of university researchers.
“There have been many different types of metrics that measure customers, from customer satisfaction to customer behavior,” the report said. “However, what seems to be a common thread amongst much of the research on customer metrics is that the end goal is to relate customer metrics to some form of customer value, for example CLV or customer equity.”
Deirdre Connelly, president of North America Pharmaceuticals at GlaxoSmithKline, wrote in Harvard Business Review that the company did away with its previous incentive structure, which used quotas, and instead switched to a program that focused on customer value. She said the company now offers sales reps bonuses for the value they give to customers, which is measured in a variety of ways.
“This patient focus is a core value for us, along with transparency, respect, and integrity,” Connelly wrote in Harvard Business Review. “So instead of specific prescriptions sold, we began to reward our representatives for their patient focus, understanding of their customer, problem solving, and level of scientific knowledge as measured by tests and other assessments.”
Companies looking to increase customer value may want to track how well their sales staff are performing through sales effectiveness metrics.
