Do Not Fear Change: Customers Will Lead You To The Promised Land

/in /by

Fear of change. Discomfort over breaking old habits. Reluctance to question what your company takes for granted. These barriers to change will kill a generation of companies as artificial intelligence enables salespeople who use mobile tools to deliver a personalized customer experience that connects brands to people in long-term trusted relationships.

We’ve all heard that no company can monopolize talent, so where can your organization turn for answers about sales and marketing strategy in a time of rapid and revolutionary change? Ask your customers. They know what they want. At a minimum, they know what they like and will explain how your company can satisfy their needs.

Tap into customer interest and intention with a smart content platform that reshapes sales messaging based on individual feedback. Based on early experience with our tools, analyzing and targeting content using customer feedback can make a sales rep as much as 44 percent more productive over their career with an organization.

Clayton Christensen, the author of The Innovator’s Dilemma, points out that 94 percent of corporate executives polled in 2016 were dissatisfied with their companies’ innovation performance because their marketing teams focus on identifying correlations in data instead of deepening their understanding of individual customers. By listening to customers’ feedback about their progress toward personal or professional goals, Christensen argues, the customer journey will be transformed from a trendline in data into specific related actions toward the customer’s success. The process requires interaction with customer’s needs and must reach into the circumstances in which they are making a purchase decision.

Detailed personal feedback can be applied throughout an organization to tune more than the sales pipeline, it can be used to recast the supply-chain, fulfillment processes, product designs, and the brand’s market interface, where discovery and selling take place.

The Sears gap

But fear gets in the way. Executives fall back on what has worked in the past. They resist training others to try new processes because they don’t want to change their daily management tasks. Too often, they wait until their company is mortally wounded before breaking out of established practices.

Sears, the Amazon of the horse-drawn era, stumbled along without successfully engaging its customers for decades before it went bankrupt this week. If Sears had been listening, its customers would have told the company how they wanted to interact with the “everything store” and what products they would buy. Fear, in the end, prevented Sears from turning around, even when a billionaire-savior CEO took over.

“While we have made progress,” Sears CEO Eddie Lampert told CNN,” the plan has yet to deliver the results we have desired.” What’s missing from that statement? The customer’s desire. If Sears had had a structured listening program in place that bridged its online, retail, and service centers, it may have learned what customers would buy and why. However, Sears focussed on its needs instead of its customers’ desires. That is what killed the company that connected mainstream consumers to mass-produced goods.

Ironically, Sears knew better 110 years ago. “We solicit honest criticism more than orders,” the 1908 Sears Catalog proclaimed. Why did it fail to keep listening? It did not move with its customers into new product segments while continuing largely impersonal, but inexpensive, retail practices.

Breaking out of your comfort zone

Listening is more than recording customer feedback. It requires intimate social and data science skills across many teams.  A personalized experience is lean, it is built by carving away non-relevant messages to get to exactly what the customer wants, why they want it, and what they are willing to spend. Personal feedback from customers must be applied to every interaction to eliminate unneeded information from brand messaging.

As companies build larger content libraries, they must not be tempted to flood the customer with information.  Internet-based e-commerce allowed marketers and sales teams became more focused on having plenty of collateral materials, which often stands in for personal interaction because it is comprehensive. If you can answer every customer question with a document or short video, why talk with and record the motives of a customer? With the rise of mobile technology and machine learning platforms that can process individual interaction data to help salespeople refine their message, the content library will continue to play an important part, but it will be broken down into smaller pieces and recombined to answer questions with a personal touch.

Artificial intelligence, which has been adopted by 47 percent of advertisers to target advertising content; 42 percent of respondents to the same eConsultancy survey reported using AI to generate dynamic creative content — combining different assets to make more personalized messages for customers.

A GEG action card delivers personalized media recommendations during sales calls.

Get out in front of demand

Unlike Sears, successful sales leaders tap into an almost infinite source of feedback from customers. A smart content platform uses feedback to coach a salesperson to ask more questions of customers during calls to refine the next engagement, too. Marketers are able to test content with test audiences on the fly before presenting it to all customers. A smart platform can alert sales management to changes in the expected response to each message, allowing for rapid identification of market changes. All these interactions are funneled through mobile apps, but only a salesperson can ask the spontaneous question that catalyzes buying intentions. By programming an initial set of sales steps, companies can monitor, target, and recast smaller content investments to serve more personalized interaction.

For instance, the Gig Econ0my Group (GEG) platform can track a series of messages between a sales rep and her customers, suggesting new content to share in response to a prospect’s expressed interests. GEG’s action card interface, which presents the “What’s Next” step to the salesperson after each interaction, can suggest a video or other asset to share with a customer based on: 1.) A change in interest level; 2.) An answer to a scripted question, such as “What are your goals with my product?”; 3.) Changes in messaging content and tone, which can spawn a response to an objection that includes a personalized video. These are only a few of the simple triggers an AI platform should be able to generate from an existing sales process.

Sears failed to invest in its future so many times that no business book will successfully capture its failure. (We recommend Audible CEO Don Katz’s The Big Store for a look at how, once, Sears managed to roar back.) Don’t let the fear of change prevent your company from investigating how to change for greater profitability. There’s a reason some companies survive through all ups and downs: A solid customer relationship that allows forward-looking brands to evolve with their customer’s needs.

If artificial intelligence sounds intimidating, don’t wait to find out what falling behind an AI-supported competitor feels like. A solid AI platform will take your existing sales process and optimize it. As it learns, you will learn more about how to leverage the insights generated by customer feedback. If you are afraid of the implications of AI, give us a call. We’ll do more than listen.

 

How Well-Documented Sales Processes Spur Sales Creativity

/in /by

The best trapeze acts work without a net, and the results can ocassionally be disastrous when plans go wrong. Brands cannot assume their sales teams can work without a net, on pure intuition instead of using a well-documented sales process, without inviting the inevitable disastrous outcomes that result from poor planning. As the economy shifts to on-demand work arrangements, it is more important than ever to give staff a sales roadmap so that they can apply their experience within the brand experience to create even better outcomes.

New distributors need a sales roadmap, even if they plan to find their own shortcuts to success. In the fast-changing, high-churn economy in which sales organizations exist today, every step in the customer’s sales experience should be scripted in order to free salespeople to innovate smartly to deliver personalized experience. That does not mean that every action a sales rep takes should follow the script, rather the script is the grounding that gives smart salespeople the ability to improvise. Direct-selling compounds the consequences of poor planning because distributors often mix multiple jobs to earn a higher income.

“We don’t want to tell our sales reps what to do” are the most dangerous words in sales management. It’s a declaration of surrender to failure. A company without well-documented processes has abandoned its ability to learn and respond to the market. Now that content management systems can be linked to machine intelligence to track sales activity, even in individual customer interactions, a well documented sales process can improve rapidly based on customer feedback. As each distributor tries variations in language and order in which content is presented, the machine learner assesses the results and encourages or discourages that behavior based on sales results.

Change — a constant evolution of marketing messaging, sales process, and customer engagement is essential to achieving personalized experience — is the only constant in business today. Without a documented starting point, companies cannot learn how to improve from the responses customers provide to their collateral, their key sales propositions, and their marketing messages to create more personalized customer experience. The benefits of personalization are clear. It produces higher customer retention, increases conversion rates by more than 400 percent, and drives customer recommendation sharing.

A smart content platform, which blends content management and delivery with machine learning that tracks sales representatives’ experiments with different messages, can automatically test the changes that create improvements. Moreover, AI can spot messaging that fails to engage and cull content to coach salespeople to use new content that performs effectively. But none of these benefits are available without the baseline of a sales plan, against which new results must be compared.

Distributor retention grows on solid selling process

Documenting the sales process is first and foremost an investment in onboarding success. It provides talented teams the confidence to improve every step of the customer engagement. New employees consistently identify the need for clear guidance during onboarding and in daily sales activities. Without that guidance, new distributors are more likely to struggle when closing their first sales and to leave the organization before contributing to the company’s profitability.

Steven W. Martin of the University of Southern California Marshall School of Business, describes top sales professionals as firmly anchored in their company’s customer interaction strategy. It allows them to “tailor … sales pitch[es] to the customer’s needs” and creating emotional connections with the customer. Marin also points out that the structure of a customer experience allows top-performing salespeople to challenge the customer’s assumptions confidently. These intimate moments happen only in the context of a strong sales engagement, but they can be pivotal to getting a deal closed because the basis for honest feedback flows both ways.

A salesperson working within a known structure knows when to step outside the script. That is the human skill for which you are paying salespeople. When augmented by machine intelligence, a rep can quickly reshape a presentation or make a new offer based on customer feedback — data analysis delivers coaching the distributor in real-time and, as they innovate on the plan, captures the changing customer response to understand whether the improvisation by the seller is effective.

Brands that fail to inculcate their basic values and messaging strategy with distributors during the early steps in their career with the company squander shareholder resources.

If your sales leadership insists that the salesforce doesn’t need a plan, challenge them to provide data that supports their argument. You may surprise those managers by asking, and you will likely not receive a quantitative answer to the question. Intuition is untestable without a documented process against which progress can be measured.

Do not let your brand grope blindly for success without plan-based metrics that allow your team to adjust quickly to changing customer sentiment. Ensure that your marketing department has the data to act on by selecting key conversion events in the sales process, and hold everyone to the facts. Is your sales process documented to support rapid analysis of changing market and customer conditions?

 

The Rules Of Duplication Are Changing

/in /by

How do you keep up with the most important driver of success in direct-selling organizations? Duplication, the recruitment of a new distributor by an existing distributor, is the basic building block for expansion of revenue and sales opportunities. Duplication is being transformed by great coaching built on personalized to the seller using emerging tools and mobile apps.

The reasons people embrace direct selling are changing with each generation and in different geographies. Success depends more than ever on adeptly targeted messaging and a deep understanding of the motivations of potential distributors. Matching the right message to the prospective distributor’s motivations can increase your duplication rate. Tracking distributor motivation is a process of:

  • Identifying messages that work, which requires experimentation with variations on language and values;
  • Recognizing when successful messages are beginning to fail, and adjusting appropriately, and;
  • Segmentation to refine similar messages for different personae.

Smart tools can track and coach distributors to succeed. Data analysis performed in the cloud and delivered by mobile app, which the distributors can use during a sales call to share content and product data, enables success. Like an athlete offered a sophisticated analysis of their performance can improve their existing skills, the salesperson in the 2020s will be the subject of ongoing personalized coaching by managers with access to insights pulled from the salesperson’s actual customer interactions. The template for success remains, but it can be customized to every type of distributor at scale with artificial intelligence.

Many aligned messages, not one

One message will not convert all of these interested salespeople. The direct-selling workforce has exploded globally since the turn of the century, growing from 116.7 million in 2017, according to the World Federation of Direct Selling Associations. For example, compensation may not be the primary criteria when selecting a job, according to a new Workplace Culture report. Nine of 10 members of Generation X surveyed for the report said they would take a lower salary to work for a company that pursues their values, far more than the 71 percent of all workers surveyed. Overseas direct sellers, in addition to earning money, are engaged in building their emerging economies for sustainable prosperity, seeking soft skills training that will make them more competitive in a day job.

Sales and marketing leadership teams need tools to test a variety of messages. In the United States, direct sales is moving into new ethnic and demographic categories that value diversity. Messaging to the 20 percent of U.S. direct sales representatives of Hispanic descent must be targeted and expressed appropriately, for example. The fact that 73.5 percent of distributors are women, according to the Direct Selling Association (DSA), demands that marketers think about female-motivating messaging for sellers, as well as how to help female representatives communicate with female and male customers successfully.

The good news is that a core set of well-defined personae provides a solid starting point for continuing experimentation and differentiation of messages. Small changes, such as using a different word to describe progress toward a weight-loss goal, for example, could transform male customer sales, while that same change will discourage female customers. Working from successful persona profiles, salespeople and marketers can develop better, targeted messages that reuse the same digital content, such a graphics or video, with subtle changes in language and imagery that improve conversion rates in specific customer segments.

Direct selling’s one-to-one engagement model offers many opportunities to try a variation on existing messages or to capture feedback from the prospective distributor. The tools also need to call out changes in response rates automatically. Daily tracking of sales-customer interaction through a What’s Next smart platform delivers data that would have been impossible to collect five years ago, but today’s machine learning technology can spot meaningful variance in conversion and identify the elements of the message that are failing.

Recruiting unicorn sellers

Smart platforms can be of the greatest help when recruiting high-performers. Less than one percent of U.S. distributors embraced full-time selling in 2017, the DSA reports. Consider adding questions to your sales process to identify these people, who are more likely to contribute the most revenue to your company. LifeVantage, a Gig Economy Group partner, found that distributors who make a sale during their first two weeks improved its distributor retention to 44 percent over their career with the company.

High-performers may be identified by asking during initial contacts about their experience with selling, preferences for training or simply the inclination to take action. Gig Economy Group’s Action Card-based interface can be customized in real-time to add these questions when a distributor is pitching a potential duplication and ignore the questions when supporting a consumer product conversion. Because every rep and contact, as well as every interaction between them, is tracked and customized by the GEG platform, it is able to gather intelligence about messaging and provide feedback to management for use when developing new content or sales steps.

Duplication is based on strong identification with the company, but also the human distributor who meets with and supports the new distributor. Fixed messaging was the best sales could do in the pre-AI era. Within the last few years, data analysis capacity leaped to a new level that allows millions of interactions to be understood and acted upon. After LifeVantage introduced GEG tools, distributors shared more content, began more customer relationships, and sent more registration forms. Now, LifeVantage is beginning to vary its messages by target audience. The early results, including growth in sales by new distributors during their first month, which grew 38 percent overall, suggest that better targeting will produce continuing improvements.

The era of personalization is only starting. Eventually, every customer might receive a unique message. For now, the challenge for direct-selling leaders is simple: Experiment. The process requires tools that recombine existing messaging and content in testable variations, extract data to identify productive changes as well as failing messages, and surface the results to human managers. With those tools in hand, finding a duplication prospect, qualifying them, and providing appropriate sales messages to the salesperson seeking to build their downline, duplication rates and early sales success performance will deliver material improvements in your bottom line.