Let’s deep dive into one of the foundations in business growth: Helping the customer make the
decision. Yes, you have a great product. Yes, customers are seeing your advertisements and
are interested in buying from you? The phrase “Take all my money and give me your product”
only happens in the movies. There is still work to convert that potential customer – business
lingo “Leads” – into a purchasing customer.

Optimize your Sales Cycle

The sales cycle is the process your business takes in the period of delivering your product to the customer, it involves several stages. Stages such as lead generation, prospecting, contact, and lead qualification, nurturing leads, making offers, countering objections, and closing deals. Different companies define their sales cycles and stages differently because of numerous factors, such as industry type, target markets, customer type, among others. These differences result in the peculiarities a business encounters in closing a deal. However, having a defining your business sales cycle affords you the opportunity to:

● Easily train new sales reps.
● Provide sales representatives with a structured roadmap in closing deals.
● Structure your sales team rightly, assigning the best fit to each step.
● Stay on top of team performance
● Optimize team performance, using the KPIs here to deliver a better sales cycle month on month.

If your company has a sales cycle that lasts less than a month, then you have a short sales cycle. On the other hand, if your company’s sales cycle takes more than twelve months, you have a long sales cycle. Ultimately, the key is the goal of a salesperson should be to minimize the cycle time as much as possible without sacrificing the rapport with the prospect.

Don’t Overwhelm Customers with Options

Marketers often believe today’s consumers as web-savvy, refined individuals who pounce on whichever brand offers the best deal. Marketers believe that brand loyalty, is gradually fading, this is the reason why they inundate customers with their messaging, believing that the more interaction and information provided, the better their chances of holding on to these increasingly distracted and disloyal customers.

From the customer point of view, the increasing volume of marketing messages isn’t validating, rather it’s overwhelming. Customers feel pulled in a million different ways by marketers’ relentless efforts to engage. Research now shows that there can be too much choice; and when this occurs, customers are less likely to buy anything at all, and if they buy, they are not satisfied with their selection. A confused mind does not order. Effective communication needs to be engaging and easily understood, the customer must be able to visualize your message so they can relate to your product. Limit the options presented to the customer to three or fewer, and then help them in the decision process. A prime example is a comparison between the Google homepage and Yahoo homepage. Google is the number one visited site on the internet, yet they’re still able to limit their homepage to a single action: Would you like to search the internet? While Yahoo’s homepage isn’t. It is not search emphasized neither is it news emphasized. Everything is loaded onto one page; the result is too many options. Which do you visit the most?

Guide the Customer Through the Process

The stages of the buying process, as earlier stated, varies with business type, however peculiar your buying process is, you have to guide your customers through this process. Here are four (4) typical stages of the buying process and how to guide the customer to choose you.

● Need Recognition: A customer enters the buying process by recognizing his/her need for a particular item. They are aware of this pain point and casually begin to look for topics about their pain point. To guide the customer, at this stage, you need to write an informational post about the pain point your product solves. Blog posts, guest articles, information, etcetera are an example of material you post where customers and
everyone spends most of their time online. That is, get your solution in front of the target audience.

● Information Search: during this phase, the customer actively searches for more information about the pain point and how to solve it. The customer performs search and visits reviews sites to learn more. At this stage TOFU content is advisable, content
similar to the need recognition stage above, such as blog posts, infographics, lists, guides, etc. however at this stage you implant important keywords into your content.

● Option Evaluation: During this stage customers evaluate the options they’ve learned about to determine which is the best solution for their problem, i.e., they already have an idea about the solution they need. They just don’t know which specific solution/brand is best. The brands that present the best offer in their opinion are what they would go for. To catch consumers in this phase, you need to engage in MOFU marketing and optimize your website so customers can find your best offering easily when they visit. Create content like FAQ pages, landing pages and buying guides on your website.

● Purchase Decision: This is the stage where the customer is ready to pull the trigger, they
have chosen the brand to go with, and the offer that best suits them. All the research
they’ve made had led to one point, that is, you. How do you help them during this
phase? Clear the pathway to make the purchase, simplify the buying process, including
testimonials and reviews that reinforce their belief that they are making the best choice.
Remove bugs in the cart and checkout process, also optimize your website to target
buyer keywords.

Most people get it wrong that feedback collection is reserved only for multinational corporations
and governmental agencies, who usually set it up because it is required by the law. Most
businesses pay lip service to customer welfare only by celebrating the customer service week in
October.
Feedback collection is a double way street, your customer gets to express themselves about the
interaction with your business, and you get first-hand information on the effectiveness of your
business.
Customer feedback is the information provided by your customers about their satisfaction or
dissatisfaction with their experience with your brand, service, or product. Listening to the voice
of the consumer allows you to be quick to change in the business arena, and be able to stay
ahead of the competition.

1. You will be able to improve your product or service. Aftermarket research and introduction of
your product, you need to keep a constant eye on the acceptance level of your product over
time, feedback helps in this regard as it keeps you abreast of consumer opinion and answers
the question of whether your product still solves customer needs.

2. Feedback helps you gauge customer satisfaction; customer satisfaction relates to a lot of
company financial details. A high customer satisfaction grants you a high market share, which in
turn results in high revenue for the company. A simple customer satisfaction gauge of 0-10 is a
reliable metric that estimates consumer loyalty and retention to your brand which helps predict
the company’s future financials.

3. Feedback shows the customer you value their opinion, and include them in the business
process. customers will know that you are in business not only for the financial remuneration but
also for the welfare of your customers. Communicating with your customers through feedback
builds a relationship that keeps your customer loyal to you, as one of the co-builders of your
business, when they see their opinions molding your product.

4. Feedback helps create the best customer experience, satisfied customers with you and you
will be able to use your loyal customer reviews to market to other potential customers. Apple
and Nike have been able to build a reputable brand because their customer experience and
loyalty bring in more customers.

5. Feedback gives you data to help in making business decisions, basing business decisions on
guesses is no longer expedient in this highly digital and competitive world. Customer insights
will help you understand market direction and predict market changes. Your product
management will improve and be more responsive using customer feedback.

Method of Getting Feedback
1. Surveys
Surveys are one of the great ways to directly ask customers for information. Surveys are either
open-ended or close-ended. There are several questions you could ask your customers. Survey
forms are one the best ways to gain customer feedback, free survey services are provided by
SurveyKing, Qualtrics among others. For the best responses, your survey questions should;
Only ask questions that target your goals
Use open-ended questions
Avoid leading questions.

2. Feedback Boxes
A feedback form/ box is a reliable method to gather customer feedback, a feedback form is an
easily accessible tool customers can utilize to give feedback. Minor issues that your survey
question might overlook would be captured by a feedback form. You should constantly check
the feedback box and make sure every feedback gets a response within 24 hours. For bugs and
technical issues, make sure your engineers respond to the issue and advise the customer on
how to resolve the issue.

3. Social Media Feedback
Social media is one of the best ways to get prospects and customer feedback. Reaching out to
your followers to get feedback is a way to see the responses to your product. Monitoring your
brand name mentions gives you the ability to quickly react to customers’ needs and deliver
value, quickly resolve customers’ negative feedback and, also improve your overall content and
communications strategy. The issue with social media feedback is the bandwagon effect on
either positive or negative feedback, therefore you must always be responsive on your social
handles to respond to negative feedback.

Increased brand awareness is a crucial task for companies with an established position in the market. Brand image can be a deciding factor for your target audience. Competition is fierce, and grabbing the attention of your potential customers is vital for your business to thrive.

Brand awareness is the level of recognition a brand has among its target audience. The levels of brand awareness answer the question – how familiar is your target market with your brand? Brand awareness is one of the major assets your brand can build. High levels of awareness can increase the value of your product or service. Building brand awareness builds competitive advantage and impacts marketing and overall business performance positively.

For example, Coca-Cola’s Coke is often used as a synonym for soft drinks, no matter the producer. This shows the level of the association the target market has for the particular product. This strong level of association builds trust in a brand and trust results in the customer capital of the company.

These are some of the different ways to increase your brand awareness.

• Social Media Advertising

Social media is the marketplace nowadays, it is normally a place where you promote your products, but it is a great avenue to increase your brand awareness in a widespread and effective manner. A part of this process is inviting influencers, influencers who have established an audience that trusts them can increase your brand awareness when they mention your brand in their content.

A good social media awareness building method is posting valuable content and including your brand name in these contents, by this people will associate your brand with valuable content and during discussions, your brand name will come up. Another is to provide freebies on your social media pages, free stuff drives people and potential customers to your brand. On a final note, craft your own social media hashtag that can easily be associated with your brand, your hashtag will help in propelling your brand.

• Co-Marketing  

Co-marketing is a brilliant method to increase your brand awareness, as it takes advantage of another brand awareness. This way both brands will have greater outreach in reaching potential customers. An aspect of leveraging on another brand is delivering valuable content on popular brands’ blogs. Guest posting is a way to get your name into the public sphere of your industry. Local partnership is a strategy that will help push your brand image, join other businesses in seminars, festivals, donate to a charity event, or sponsor a local event in your location having your brand widely publicized therein, all these are sure to move your brand to recognition. Contact both online and offline magazines, news sources, or other publications to see if they’ll publish your content (it is sure the response will be positive if your content is valuable enough). By this means you’ll open your brand to the audience of these publications.

• Creative Identity

Craft a unique identity for your brand, create a superb and compelling story around your brand, this will make people connect deeply with your brand.

Interact your followers on the social media space, post content that lets your followers drop comments, engagements allow your followers to remember you and drive more followers to your brand. Give your social interactions the personality of the identity you’ve created, with this people can easily associate the identity with your brand. Oftentimes infuse humor into your interactions.

Hire a recognizable face for your brand, this allows you to humanize your brand, think of Heineken and the 007 brands, Nike and Michael Jordan. Otherwise, you can create a mascot for your brand, mascots will give life to your logo, for example, MailChimp uses a Chimp named Freddie, Reddit uses a character named Snoo.

Making your product exclusive is one of the ways to create a unique identity around your brand. You could offer exclusive deals to your customers, and discounts for referring other customers, or you give them bonus content that they can brag about.

Other avenues to increase brand awareness is through:

• SEO Advertising
• Branded Packaging
• Catchy Slogan
• Surveys
• Referral Programs

Would you like to explore avenues to increase the brand awareness for your business, reach out to us here

Your Unique Value Proposition (UVP) is a short, but clear message to inform your customers about the uniqueness of your product, and why they are better choosing your product over others. Your UVP is not a slogan but a marketing strategy in selling your brand.

TARGET CUSTOMERS: Know your customers, your unique value proposition is speaking to your potential customers, therefore you must know who they are, their buying preferences, their goal, their challenges, fears, and how you help them solve these things. Not everyone is you customer, you should have an idea of who your ideal customer is, the age range, economic status, their preferences, these will help in crafting a statement that resonates with them.

TRACK YOUR CUSTOMER NEEDS: Customer needs changes frequently, and the way customer A interacts with your product surely differ with the way customer B interacts with your product. You have to keep track of all major ways your product is consumed. This way you can communicate the importance of your product to other potential customers. By keeping track of your customer needs you will get notified quickly of changing customer needs and apply the necessary pivot where necessary to remain relevant.

YOUR OFFERING: Know your products, its benefits, its uniqueness, and peculiarities. Craft your offering into a one or two sentence statement and know it by heart, your team must also know this statement. The statement must be direct and clear, and be on your advertisement, and wherever your potential customers can see it.

PROOF OF CONCEPT: After knowing what you offer by heart, you must be able to proof how it works, who it has worked for, and the potential benefits your customer gains from utilizing your product. If you do not have a previous customer that can serve as a relevant example, use examples from a similar industry but a different geography that such product has produced the desired result.

AVOID UNNECESSARY ADDITIONS: After getting to know the customer needs, make the important need your main selling point, this is what you advertise to the customer segment you are targeting. That is, each customer segment gets the tailored advertisement, avoid noise, when your research is perfect your customers will relate better to your product. KEEP ADVERTISING: Let me end the newsletter with the title of a movie: “Never Back Down”. You don’t stop advertising. Why? You may ask so as to keep your sales funnel full, there are over 7 billion people worldwide, there is surely someone who hasn’t heard about your product; therefore, you keep advertising.

The modern-day business world is run by data, the data is used to power business decisions. Business decisions are backed by facts, numbers, and trends. Numbers and data are generated by almost everything, it is therefore left to the business decision-maker to examine and analyze the data to determine the most important ones in strategy development.

Sadly, most businesses do not use the data generated, research by Inc.com found that businesses don’t use 73% of their generated data, also the companies who utilize data only make use of less than half of the company’s generated data in making decisions.

The benefits of utilizing data effectively cannot be overemphasized, a company would be able to:

1) Know the exact needs of its customers,

2) Determining important customers,

3) Make savings from doing aimless advertising,

4) The important resources that affect the business process and end-product success,

5) Predict the future of the business environment.

·         Knowing customer needs: Understanding that data is more than just numbers, data is both qualitative and quantitative. Therefore, in terms of customer service, the best data available is the feedback by customers. The best way for feedback that’s effective is routine feedback, constant collection gives a track of what your customers feel every time they interact with your service. Feedback questions vary with a range of numbers, but a simple yet encompassing question to an overview of customer service is: “How likely are you to refer us to a friend?” This is a simple measure of how satisfied a customer is. Whenever a customer rating falls below the business average, you immediately reach out on how you can better serve the customer.

·         Segmenting customers: Your customer list is a combination of different segments. It consists of the casual one-timers, the loyal everyday shopper, and VIPs. Curating this list will need more information about your customers, but once this list is set up, analyzing makes segmentation of your customer base is easier. Therefore, you can reach out to each segment using specific messages, e.g., those who prefer discount coupons and the segments that prefer bespoke services.

·         Make savings on advertising: Advertising is an important business expense, however, employing data helps reduce unproductive advertising. Analyzing data such as customer profiles will help to streamline marketing efforts to the best channels that will yield maximum customers. Businesses employing many channels of advertising will benefit greatly, as data will enable them to perform targeted advertising campaigns at a lower cost.

·         Prioritize business process: Data and its analysis can help in optimizing business processes, analyzing previous business data will help in determining important and necessary processes in the supply chain, and less important and unnecessary processes. To this end, businesses can run effectively, by simplifying encumbering processes and cutting unnecessary costs.

·         Predict the future of business: A business that excels in data and is customer-centric, will be able to timely and adequately forecast business trends. Such businesses rely on previous data gathered and analyze this data to decipher trends and patterns. With advances in artificial intelligence, business forecasting has been transformed. Ideal data sets are chosen, queried, and analyzed, the forecast is verified and relayed to decision-makers so the business can stay ahead of competitors.

Business executives must examine bigger trends in the market, such as changes in the pricing of resources, shipping, or manufacturing. Data helps in the decision to:

Do nothing and absorb the higher costs, because it has enough of a profit margin to still be successful, while many of its competitors will need to raise prices. Or decide to increase the price while transferring the costs to the consumer, because of data on their loyal customers or the uniqueness of their products.

Another important data in business is the customer experience data, which is a non-financial business performance indicator i.e., data that cannot be expressed in monetary terms, which are related to customer relationships and their workings, product or service quality, and so on.

Examples of companies utilizing data effectively are Google and Facebook. These two companies heavily rely on the consumer data they generate to improve their products, services, and ultimately user experience, evidence of this is increasing irresistible usage these two companies have garnered over the years, thus making them the best Ads platforms through which other businesses advertise their product and services. Back home in Nigeria, a company utilizing data generated is MTN Nigeria, this company has grown to be the telecom with the largest subscriber base in Nigeria. MTN constantly introduces plans and programs that resonate with its consumers, thereby increasing its customer base. All this points to the company utilizing its customer experience data.The importance of data cannot be overemphasized, therefore the faster your company gets its data strategy right the better. Here at EZAdvisory, we have the tools and skilled personnel to help you make sense of the data your business generates and we help you build the right strategy towards your desired growth aim. Check out our audit offering here.

Until you have mastered the art of selling, every time you go out to introduce and sell your product to people, it is always a battle.

[Name], since you have a product or service you sell, meeting people to introduce your business to is a must. Only a sales funnel that is full, can generate continuous sales.

Today, I want to give you tips to help in approaching potential customers.

·         Before Approach

Research: After getting your list of potential customers, the next step is to research your prospects, know what they do and how your product can be of value to them. The best places where you can conduct detailed research are: LinkedIn, the company’s website, competitor research, blogs and other avenues where an advisory service like ours, comes in.

Grooming: An inexperienced salesperson may ask, does looks matter? For salespersons, grooming is an indispensable tool in your sales approach. Grooming gives a professional look on your person. Be hygienic, dress neatly and dress according to the codes of the organisation you are going. Wear a smile and be confident.

Rehearse: A silver bullet to speech mistakes and errors is rehearsal, rehearsing increases your confidence. You will be so familiar with your notes that whatever the nerves you get you could not forget the words.

·         Approach

Interaction:  During interaction, you introduce yourself to the prospect, simply introduce your product. While leading the prospect to talk.

Conversation: Here, you listen to the prospect about his/her needs while picking the pain point and thinking about how your product will help the prospect.  Pain points is the opportunity for you to be able to reach and convince the customer of the necessity of your product.

Explanation: This is where you respond to the client’s concerns and sell your products, especially how your product will solve the customers problem. Here you speak/demonstrate about the value points of your products, the uniqueness of your product to competitors’ own, if any. Here, you also brag about the length of time you’ve been in business, and drop names of your customers that are renowned.

Closing: After this you try to close the customer based on your view on the level of the client. Some clients will require you schedule another appointment for a visit before you close them.

There are different types of closing techniques, these are:

Trial close: you ask questions such as, “What do you think about the product?”

Soft close: you ask questions such as, “What would you like to do?”, “Do you want to continue with this?”

Hard close: you ask questions such as, “Are you ready to move forward?”

·         After Approach

Keep the Relationship going as people only buy from friends, if they think you have their interest at heart, they will purchase from you. This will also make retargeting easy, because whenever they need/ know who needs your product they will be sure to buy from /introduce you.

Want an expert review of your business, and take your business to the next level? Call +2347012140254. Mail: advisory@equilibrumzone.org

Still following our series on data and its importance for all business ventures. We are looking at the process and methods of getting data for business improvement.

The process of collecting data involves some form of preparation before going into data collection proper. Firstly, you need to determine what type of data you need to collect, what type of customer details are important, who do you need this data from, and how much information do you need. Secondly, you need to set up a plan for getting the information you need. What is the timeframe of the data collection? Some data needs to be collected continuously, such as daily sales count. While some only need to be collected once, e.g., customer details. 

Each data collection method depends on the type of data, timeframe of the collection, and other criteria you’ve set. Here are the five (5) most common data collection methods:

Surveys

Surveys are one of the great ways to directly ask customers for information. Surveys are usually open-ended or close-ended. Close-ended surveys are surveys where the answers are predefined and respondents choose one of the listed answers. Open-ended surveys, on the other hand, give the respondents the freedom to answer the survey questions in their own words. Surveys are conducted online, via emails, over the phone, or in person. The easiest and best method in this digital age however is online on your website or a third-party website, where the link to the survey is shared via various means.

• Online Tracking

Your website, or mobile application if your business possesses it, is a powerful data amassing tool. At least 40 data values are collected from visitors to your website, data such as; Ip addresses, the inbound page, time spent on your site, browsing activity, among others. Your WebHost will most likely collect this information or you may add cookies to track user behaviour. Analyzing the tons of data collected by your website through website analytics software will help interpret prospect and customer behaviour.

• Collection of Subscription and Registration Data

This method involves offering customers something in return for providing their information. This involves customers filling a form of basic information for those who want to sign up for something or your email list, rewards, coupons, or other benefits. Data such as name, gender, email, birth year, are common information usually collected. Better still, respondents can be asked to create an account with your website, so they can be recognized and tracked across the different devices they use to access your website. The collection of data has to be balanced between asking for too much data, which puts the user off and, asking for too little data for your analytics purposes.

• Social Media Monitoring

Social media is one of the best ways to get prospects and customer data. Looking through your follower’s list and discovering similarities between your followers is a way to see who your audience is, and what the target audience should be. Monitoring your brand name mentions gives you the ability to quickly react to customers’ needs and deliver value, quickly resolve customers’ negative feedback and, also improve your overall content and communications strategy. Social media monitoring gives you the use of analytics to gain insights into your business standing.

• Online Marketing Analytics

Marketing campaigns are a valuable avenue to get data, whether the marketing is done on the search listing, webpages, email, or other offline marketing campaigns. The source of the advertising will provide, the number of people reached, who clicked the adverts, devices used, and where they were sent. Offline marketing can be tracked by asking customers where they got information about your brand.

Bonus

• In-store Traffic Monitoring

If you own a physical store, data can be obtained from the visits to your store. A count of daily visits can easily show the busiest hours in the business day, and the type of product drawing customers to your store. The number of goods sold in the stores is also a good pointer to the relationship between you and your customers, and popular products.

Making sense of the data you have got, will help to understand to a great extent your audience and how you can better reach them, identify areas through which you can improve your business, and insights for future expansion. Knowing your best-selling products and ways to pivot your brand for better acceptance. 

At EZAdvisory, we not only help you optimize data collection for your business but also help you make sense of the data to provide a clear vision of your business growth. Visit our website: advisory.equilibriumzone.org