How to Leverage Sales from Customer Success

As technology and SaaS industries have become increasingly crowded with niche products, many businesses face customer retention challenges. Today, many companies face challenges on how to meaningfully onboard new customers and help them understand their products and their true value, resulting in low customer retention rates.

Business owners have added customer success functions to deliver outstanding customer experiences to solve this issue. Customer success teams help consumers get maximum value from their purchases and increase customer loyalty and retention rates.

Customer success functions have skyrocketed since their inception in the early 2000s, and some businesses are even leveraging customer success to boost their revenues. As customer success teams work closely with consumers post-purchase, they keep and grow clients by identifying unmet needs and cross-sell and upsell opportunities. 

Even further, customer success managers and their teams can use their in-depth knowledge of customers to identify potential new products or features, resulting in massive opportunities for more sales. In this article, you’ll learn how to leverage customer success to generate more sales.

 

Who Is Using Your Product?

In any business, you must understand who your ideal customer is. Failing to understand who uses your products or your target customer is where companies go wrong.

It’s often a transactional moment when entrepreneurs first discover their ideal customers. But unfortunately, entrepreneurs operate their businesses without truly knowing who is using their products, questioning why the sales process is so challenging and why it never seems to generate the desired results.

Also, it’s common to hear that our products are “perfect for everyone.” But unfortunately, this is where most companies fail because they have a generic offer that doesn’t strongly capture anyone’s attention. 

To determine who is buying your products and get to know them better:

• Study current customers. Look at their age bracket, gender, location, industry, and income level. This will give you a quick rundown of “who is buying your product?”
• Analyze their current habits. To gain an in-depth understanding of who your existing customers are, ask yourself what your current customer reads? What information do they Google? Where do they Google for this information from? What devices do they use? Do they use computers or mobile devices to search for information? By knowing what your current customers are searching for and where they’re, you’ll reach them with ease.
• Identify their needs and goals. Knowing what your current customer wants to achieve can help you create effective marketing content. For instance, if you’re a fitness trainer who works with brides-to-be, knowing that your target client wants to drop three dress sizes before her big day will instantly intrigue her and may entice them to do business with you.
• Know their fears. Consumers often make purchases for one of two reasons: they have a problem they need to resolve or a desire they need to fulfill. If you and your customer success team can identify a challenge your target customer faces and offer solutions to their problems, most likely, your products will be in high demand, boosting your sales. 

 

What Are They Saying About It?

You love your products. After all, you’ve put a lot of effort into building an ideal product and hiring the right employees that uniquely capture your business’s goals. However, it doesn’t just matter what you think about your products. What’s vital is knowing what your customers say about them. Unfortunately, as an entrepreneur, it’s incredibly daunting to step outside of your point of view. Luckily, the following questions can help you gain a better understanding of your clients’ perspectives:

• Are my products appreciated? Businesses beg for surveys and customer feedback because they work! Online reviews and surveys are brilliant tools you can leverage to know what your customers feel about your products. Asking for customer feedback through these methods is the best way to determine if your customers are on board with your product or not. Taylor Dipo notes, “Clients don’t want to feel heard; they want to know they are heard.”

• What are my product’s primary issues? Getting your current customers to pinpoint if there’s anything about your product that bothers them is tricky. However, it’s daunting to improve your product without hearing positive and negative feedback. To get to the heart of what your customers feel about your product, you must ask specific questions about various aspects of your product:
  • How would you rate the durability of my products?
  • What do you feel about the style and design?

These questions can help you understand what your existing customers think about your products, ultimately improving your brand perception and customer satisfaction and boosting customer loyalty and retention rates.

 

How Can You Reach Out?

Modern consumers are increasingly more and more demanding to businesses. You can’t overlook the fact that 84% of millennials don’t like traditional advertising. Thus, besides advertising and sales promotion, you need to create valuable content and promote your business on social media. That’s because leveraging old methods to reach out to consumers is no longer profitable. To reach out to your customers and drive more sales:

• Offer consistent client experience. Consistency is what many consumers seek from businesses. Moreover, it’s the key to boosting customer satisfaction and retention. According to McKinsey & Company, delivering a consistent customer experience across the entire customer journey increases customer satisfaction, builds customer trust, boosts loyalty, and ultimately improves retention rates. 
• Leverage content marketing. Rather than trying to attract new customers yourself, you can let them find your brand online. However, to do that, you must offer your target audience high-quality and valuable content that resonates with them. 
• Leverage customers’ testimonials. Customer testimonials are fundamental content elements because they’re unbiased content that prompts web visitors to buy your products. They can help you build credibility and gain trust with your prospective customers. Unfortunately, just publishing customer testimonials on your site isn’t adequate to attract more customers. To reap maximum benefits from customer testimonials:
  • Make your testimonials more eye-catching by adding images.
  • Record videos with your customers.
  • Display your testimonials everywhere.
• Set up referral programs. A referral program should be part of your brand’s customer acquisition strategy. It’ll help you gain new customers, and your current customers will also benefit from this program. Here are three proven ways to get the customer referrals you want:
  • Provide seamless referring experiences.
  •  Corporate with services and products reviewers.
  • Offer partner programs at the right time.
• Increase your online presence. Increasing your online presence is fundamental in reaching out to potential customers. Start by optimizing your site because it’s one of the first places prospects will check out first. Then research your competitors to determine what platforms they’re on and the kinds of content they create that resonate with your target customers. Finally, mirror their approach and develop better and more valuable content to serve your target audience. 

 

How Can You Encourage More Sales from Existing Customers?

Companies need to grow to sustain themselves, and gaining as many customers as possible is the primary way to achieve this. However, that may cause a decrease in quality customer service if a business lacks the means to scale up. 

To avoid that problem, you must focus on increasing sales from your existing customers. It’s relatively easier to get a current customer to buy your products or services than to convince a new prospect to take the plunge. Here’s how you can effectively encourage more sales from your current customer base:

• Bundle your products. Bundle a few services or products together for a discounted price to get your existing customers to try some of your other products or services.
• Identify upsell opportunities. Encourage your sales employees to return to current customers and sell related services or products to them. Think of the number of times you’ve bought electronics, and the salesperson has to convince you to purchase an extended service plan. Fortunately, customers often take the bait.
• Offer discounts and offers. After monitoring your shopping cart, email existing customers who didn’t complete their transactions and offer them a discount to encourage them to complete their purchases.
• Leverage customer rewards. Just like airlines do with frequent fliers, there’s no reason you shouldn’t reward existing customers with a loyalty program. Offer your existing customers rewards and discounts on their birthdays or for every five purchases; give them one free.
• Give freebies. Free samples won’t cost you an arm and a leg, but they could boost your sales by provoking good feelings among your current customers, convincing them to pass the freebies to friends, family, or colleagues, and ultimately driving more sales.

 

Zight (formerly CloudApp) Delivers Personalized Customer Experiences

Discover how your team can respond faster with Zight (formerly CloudApp). Zight (formerly CloudApp) delivers a suite of tools that makes it easy for your customer success team to create personalized image and video content. With Zight (formerly CloudApp), your team can quickly capture their screens and annotate those screen recordings and images with ease. You no longer need to tell your customers the steps; you can show them an HD video or screenshot of how to solve their problems. Also, annotation makes it easy to emphasize sections of your user interface so your customers can see the entire dashboard but focus on its most critical elements.