Customer loyalty research (NPS in particular) has definitively shown that by soliciting and acting on customer feedback, that loyalty and retention rates can be increased. Results include more sales and more profitable sales.
I contend that by applying the same type of feedback management principles (at QuestBack we call it Ask / Act) that selling processes can be improved such that selling in all phases of the sales cycle is more effective. This would mean higher rates of leads generated per suspect, higher rates of qualified leads per lead, higher rates of prospects converted from qualified leads and higher rates of customer acquisitions per prospect. I've listed seven different areas where this kind of sales process feedback may offer benefits, though there are potentially more.
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In my experience, the biggest flaw in sales processes is the necessity for sales people to record their activities in a CRM system. Since they largely do only the required minimum data entry, at every sales process stage some customer insight is missing, inaccurate, out of date or a combination thereof. This causes tremendous waste of energy across the organization, missed sales opportunities, poorly chosen sales pursuits and forgone opportunities to increase sales generally.
The problem is compounded by the progressively more difficult selling environment engendered by ever better educated prospects and customers. Losing deals because of missing information drives sales managers crazy, and always has. But, today where a new contact might be as much as 60% of the way through their buying process, having an inexperienced lead gen person contacting them might keep you out of a winnable sales cycle altogether. Asking new leads to estimate their buying process stage by itself might help sales organizations perform better.
In my opinion, Feedback management can improve sales processes in the following ways:
- Lead Generation - Validating Lead Quality and Buying process
- Lead Nurturing - Is the lead still a lead?
- Prospect Mining - Have we missed potential prospects?
- Prospect Validation - Is the prospect a good fit for our solution(s)?
- Customer Entry Profiling - Validate solution "fit", document business objectives
- Customer Satisfaction / Loyalty - How are we doing vis-a-vis business objectives?
- Exit / Win Back - Can we get a lost customer back?
Lead Generation:
Many companies take lists of "suspects" and have their inside sales team make phone calls. "Leads" generated this way are often not good fits and cost money to validate. An e-mail based lead validation survey sent to each "Lead" within a feedback process would provide an additional automated step that ensures a quality lead is being generated and would improve data quality in the CRM. Surveying inbound leads in a similar fashion would do the same for them. Fakes, frauds and indifferents would rapidly drop off (many by simply ignoring your request for feedback). Those leads who provide feedback will be "qualified" as being interested. More importantly they have engaged with you and are, at least, likely to be a good fit. Using Follow-up based on answers to key questions would allow for Sales Executives to immediately get involved with high priority leads.
Lead Nurturing:
Any lead that meets the criteria for requiring nurturing should be periodically tested for continued interest, relevant business need, timeline, or other characteristic that might indicate a need to engage, or disengage with them. Periodically surveying "nurture" status leads is a great way to determine if those leads are valid and if they need actions beyond additional nurturing.
Prospect Validation:
After a lead has been designated as a prospect, either because of a sales meeting, webinar, product demonstration, etc., feedback should be sought from them to validate their "fit" with your solution. Any discrepancies between "fit" articulated by the customer and perceptions logged by sales personnel should be documented and researched. If sales meetings are used in the process, those meetings can also be evaluated using feedback surveys. Sales meetings should offer value for customers if they don't, it is important to know why.
Prospect Mining:
In any sales process that deals with lots of leads, some that should become prospects do not. Either via oversight, misunderstanding or other reason, some leads are overlooked or mischaracterized as not being nurturable. Whenever a lead is moved out of the sales process an Exit Survey should be offered to them. Within the Exit survey, there should be an opportunity for the lead to requalify themselves for re-entry into the sales process.
Customer Entry Profiling:
After a deal is done with a customer one would think that the sales organization knows and has documented the most information it ever will have on the customer. Amazingly, that turns out to not be the case in many instances. Again, for a variety of reasons sales people neglect to do data entry on customers who are actually buying and why they bought. Surveying customers upon entry allows your sales process to correct for human fault and acquire key information that will be needed later to retain the customer.
Customer Satisfaction / Loyalty:
Satisfied and more importantly Loyal customers stay longer, buy more and are more profitable than other customers. Surveying for CSAT / Loyalty today is a "no-brainer". If you aren't doing it you should be.
Exit / Win Back:
In similar vein to Exit surveys for prospect mining, Exit / Win Back surveys are a great way to ensure that customers who should be retained are retained. Or, if not retained, then enough is learned from them about reasons for defecting so that other customers later on can be retained based on process or product changes.
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By incorporating more Feedback / Actioning mechanisms into sales processes its possible to capture and institutionalize knowledge about why some leads transition to prospects and others don't. Why some prospects transition to customers and others do not. By actioning feedback you'll start increasing those ratios immediately. Over time, better information will help increase the share of leads that transition to prospects and the share of prospects that transition to customers. As we have seen through use of NPS increasing the share of customers who stay customers has a profound effect on company profits. The same effect can be had by applying a feedback / actioning process to leads, prospects and customers.
