Technological advancements have upended B2B sales. Salespeople need to make the right move at the right time and propose a unique value proposition.
While data plays a crucial role in building your sales pipeline, one should focus on the quality of the outreach, not the volume.
Decision-making at big B2B companies is often influenced by anecdotes and annual surveys. Due to the lack of reliable information managers tend to make decisions based on wrong customer feedback.
The process of acquiring customer feedback has to be regular to gain the right kind of results. It’s dangerous for big organizations to rely on annual data and create anecdotes around it.
The typical process to gather customer feedback involves a year-end survey. This produces analysis based on too many wrong questions asked to too few of the right people.
What should the companies do right to emit this process?
The answer lies in Regular Feedbacks.
The accumulation of data, the cataloging of data, and the analysis of data are the key steps that need to be followed at a large scale to convert anecdotes and myths into statistical facts.
Listed below are some of the key steps that every organization should follow to get the right information for decision-making
Feedback accumulation
The process of acquiring data usually gets difficult to achieve when it comes to B2B organizations. To get true feedback for your organization, it’s important to follow the right steps of gathering the information.
You need to make sure that you’re asking the right questions, right kind of people, and right number of people.
The Decision-making process in an organization is intricate and is influenced by the people and elements of the organization. Providing the managers/marketers with the right account map can help them extract valuable information.
Questions such as, Who in the organization approves vendors to get in business with? Who is the decision-maker for each kind of purchase? And so on needs to be asked while interviewing a relevant person.
Stating these questions out loud becomes a tricky process due to the involvement of numerous people with the capacity to influence the buying decision.
Therefore, it’s advisable to spend time on your research to find right people who make these decisions in an organization.
After identifying the target decision-makers, the process of choosing the right message becomes crucial. This will help you extract the required information.
Insight analysis
Collecting people’s responses from your customer’s organization is important. By forwarding these insights to your sales team, account managers or their designees can analyze these feedbacks and can place follow-up calls to learn more about the feedback.
These conversations provide a great opportunity to demonstrate your understanding of the customer’s needs and to explain to them how your team can address these issues.
Accumulating these responses help prioritize key accounts which are demanding instant changes. This feedback also helps review sales strategy, letting you make necessary amendments to influence customer’s decisions in the buying process.
This step of analyzing your data becomes crucial because it contains information that requires attention from team leads as well as from center heads.
Identification of growth prospects across the company
Insights received from the feedback and follow-ups of the customer help establish the introduction of new growth opportunities.
An overhead view of the acquired data might help reveal certain loopholes or customer behavior that is generally omitted or ignored by the organizations.
The teams responsible for such customers and accounts will have statistical proof which will be demanding changes and improvements in the ongoing sales strategy.
Sales feedback will help the organization receive concrete data based on which they can help map their future strategies. Data also helps in the removal of damaging practices that were going unnoticed by the team leads.
To conclude, continuous, quick, and reliable customer feedback will help the B2B managers understand the process without filters and loopholes.
It will help omit all myths that are formed due to a single annual survey leading towards a stronger relationship with your customer.
Analysis of the accumulated feedback will help managers make data-driven decisions. Additionally, it will also help other department functions of the organization like marketing and public relations, target the customer accurately and in a more personalized manner.
