Manufacturers, the best way to keeping your customers satisfied is to truly understand their needs.
Satisfied customers not only stay customers — they also buy more. 81% of industrial buyers say good customer service makes them more likely to make repeat purchases.
Leveraging a digitally-driven approach and the right technology can empower your organization to gain crystal-clear insights into your customers’ needs, improve their experience, and:
- Increase opportunities for upsell
- Find new departments, buying groups, and contacts for cross-selling
- Prevent your customers from churning
Customer satisfaction doesn’t have to rely on monthly or quarterly calls. It can be a proactive part of your business that drives more revenue.
How to Gain Deeper Insights Into Your Customers
Fact-finding missions shouldn’t stop once a prospect becomes a customer. You may have uncovered their pain points, mapped out the entire buying team, and delivered a personalized experience throughout their buying journey. But are you expending the same effort after they’ve signed?
Customers represent a huge opportunity to grow your business, but it takes the right strategies and tools to uncover the insights to tap into that potential.
With a platform like 6sense, you can better uncover hidden insights that will help you understand your customers’ needs and maintain a strong relationship.
Leveraging the right technology will unlock:
- The keywords and topics your customers are researching
- The content on your website they are engaging with
- Contacts in different departments/locations you might not know about
- Signals that your customers are looking at the competition
This incredibly insightful data gives your teams a leg up in expanding your business with your customers.
Turning Insights Into Real Opportunities
After you’ve unlocked better and deeper insights into your customers, it’s time to put that information to use. There are several ways to use intent data about your customers to drive your revenue activities.
Upsell and Cross-sell Opportunities
For manufacturers with dozens (or even hundreds) of products and departments, the ability to upsell or cross-sell is an enormous opportunity. The chances of closing a new deal in the manufacturing industry range between 5% and 20% — but the likelihood of selling to a customer dramatically increases to 60% to 70%.
Creating upsell and cross-sell opportunities is a lot easier when you know exactly what topics and offerings your customers are interested in. Rather than trying to decipher which of your customers may want to expand based on arbitrary data like their number of warehouses or annual revenue, you can use real-time data to understand which of your customers are ready to expand their relationship.
The intent data we talked about earlier — the research your customers are performing, the pages on your site they’re visiting — all add up to create a picture of a buyer that’s ready to discuss different offerings.
Eliminate the guesswork for your sales team by providing them with real data showing the customers that are actively researching your solutions. They’ll be empowered to reach out right away and start a conversation.
“Some of our best success stories have come from one of our SDRs seeing someone on the website and sending their account rep a message in Salesforce saying, ‘Your customer is on the website. Give ‘em a call,’” says Bob Dudzinski, VP of Corporate Development at Custom Truck.
Stop a Customer from Churning
One of the biggest gut-punches for any business is losing a customer.
The intent data we’ve been talking about can also reveal when customers may be considering a switch. For instance, they might be searching for topics related to your competitor, or they’re giving off signals that they’re about to start the buying journey again.
Using that information gives your teams the opportunity to prepare a plan to mitigate churn.
Your customer service team can proactively reach out to discuss any issues they may have. Your marketing team can create campaigns to help them achieve more success with your products. Your sales team can uncover opportunities where different services might win them back.
With the right technology, you can stay ahead of any potential problems and ensure your customer remains happy throughout your entire relationship.
Conclusion
Your customers are your most valuable asset — and they’re your biggest opportunity to grow the business. Uncover deeper insights into their actions and create specific campaigns to keep them happy — and retain their business.
