As customers progress through their first interaction with your brand to their first purchase, and then on to additional purchases, strategic management of their data and preferences across multiple departments is critical for success. Ensuring each of your operations (ops) teams have access to the information they need will help them provide a better customer experience. This means you’ll have happier customers and repeat purchases.
Here are the 3 key ways to empower your ops teams – a.k.a. your ops stars – to ensure your customers keep on coming back for more.
#1: Get Good Data for Each Lead Stage
Leads, which we think of as future customers, can encounter your business in numerous ways. Tracking how they first connect with your business is key for sales and marketing operations teams. Your marketing team needs to know which campaigns are doing the best job at capturing new customers, so they can prioritize those campaigns, while your sales team needs the customer background information to have a tailored conversation with the lead, which will make closing the sale more likely. This lead data needs to be captured, routed to the right entry in your CRM, and available to sales and marketing (all processes LeanData empowers businesses to do).
Leads usually have several interactions with your brand before the sale closes, and each touchpoint helps your ops stars better understand the customer. Each interaction needs to be routed back to the right entry in the CRM. Interactions vary from the number of blogs read, guides downloaded or online advertisements clicked. With this information, your sales ops team can move in to close the deal faster by developing a pitch that will match their key needs. Similarly, your marketing ops team can continue to create the kind of content that drives leads to your business and convinces leads to convert.
In the final phase, the transition from lead to customer, learnings from the sales cycle or final agreements with the sales ops team need to be readily available to your customer service ops team to avoid any duplicative conversations. They should be able to look at a customer’s CRM entry and read what’s already been specified by the customer in order to jump straight in. The bottom line? Excellent service.
#2: Get a Full Picture of the Customer
Once a lead makes its first purchase and becomes a customer, it is important that all lead information carries over to become a part of the customer’s CRM entry, giving all your various ops teams a full picture of that customer. From special requests made during the sales cycle to invoice requirements and customer service inquiries relating to their initial order, all the data needs to be correctly aligned to the customer’s CRM entry for your various ops stars.
As the customer continues on its journey, future purchases need to be correctly mapped back to the company’s CRM entry so that your ops teams will have a clear picture of this customer’s lifetime value. This will help marketers better target other high lifetime value customers, help your sales org share testimonials and examples of happy customers, and ensure your customer service team prioritizes your best customers for servicing needs.
Based on the ideal customer profile of your best current customers (business type, size, revenue or service needed), your sales team can also better understand who their top prospects are and get a more complete customer picture.
#3: Enable Continued Customer Engagement
Customer engagement data should be readily available to all ops teams. Engagement data includes marketing emails and customer service inquiries. Such data will help your teams ensure they are providing adequate engagement throughout the year to remain top of mind. Consistent engagement with customers will make repeat purchases more likely.
Interactions with your ongoing marketing campaigns will help your marketing team better understand what engagement tactics work best – and what your customer is interested in.
It’s important your CRM and related solutions can correctly map any email clicks or submitted customer service inquiries back to the right business entry. Otherwise, your ops teams won’t be sure as to the last time your business interacted with the customer, and perhaps even more important, why a lack of insights could lead to duplicative emails about the same matter.
Contact LeanData today for more information on how LeanData can help you with your sales initiatives.