Engaging customers as a salesperson can be difficult. It requires a lot of research on your end. You need to know what your customers’ and prospects’ values are, what will be mutually valuable for your business and theirs, and what they’re about, in general. That may not sound too bad on the surface, but when you realize how much research you’ll have to do to accurately assess how to engage your customers, you’ll grasp just how much work you have cut out for you.
Certainly, customer engagement is relevant to more than just the sales team. It should be a company-wide business principle. But it is something that particularly affects sales. It’s also something you can train for.
Like many things in the business world, the quality of your sales team’s customer engagement is heavily affected by the quality of their training. But what determines the efficacy of sales training? What can ensure that salespeople will complete their training knowing how to engage customers? We can help you answer those questions.
The B2B and SaaS Conundrum
For businesses that simultaneously follow the Business to Business (B2B) and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) sales models, customer retention is one of the biggest challenges facing the sales team, partially because it’s more difficult to engage customers. Not only are businesses selling their goods and services to other businesses, not just individual customers, but they also sell their products on a subscription basis, which means that they have to retain customer loyalty throughout every subscription period.
The combination of B2B and SaaS results in a sales conundrum. Sales teams have to keep their customers’ loyalty over time rather than just at the moment of purchase. The job of the sales person extends beyond the initial sale. You have to continue nurturing customer loyalty through ongoing engagement so that customers will stick around for another subscription period.
Responding to the Challenge
The data show that businesses with strong training solutions succeed more than businesses with inadequate or absent sales training. You may be asking yourself, “What is a strong training solution?” And that’s a fantastic question.
One of many components of sales training that’s proven to bolster performance is the adoption of sales learning technologies. According to a Sales Management Association (SMA) study, “On average, firms that use technology effectively were 57% more effective at sales training and development than ineffective technology users.” One thing we can be sure about is that the implementation of innovative and useful technology boosts the quality of online sales training.
One such technology is responsive AI. Content creators have had to figure out how to deliver sales training that simulated real-life sales experiences. Responsive AI has been one of the most impactful innovations for sales training content because it places trainees in situations they will likely encounter in actual sales calls. Trainees can make decisions in their training, and the AI will respond to their choices.
How does this relate to customer engagement? It’s quite simple, really. With training that features responsive AI, trainees often find themselves in sales call simulations where they have to engage the customers to make the sale or to foster customer loyalty.
For example, sales training with responsive AI often teaches the trainees to conduct mutually-valuable sales calls in which both parties benefit from the sale. Learners will gain the skills necessary to ensure that customers stick around.
DigitalChalk Can Help
Ask us about how a DigitalChalk sales training solution can help you leverage technology for the benefit of your sales team. Contact any of our training experts today.