Sales is once again undergoing a universal and fundamental change in order to meet the demands of a more informed and increasingly digital consumer. 

Research studies show that customers spend at least 50% of total shopping time researching products online. Digitally empowered and socially networked, they have high expectations of service providers.

This change in customer and buyer behavior is only set to continue. And that poses some fundamental challenges for businesses as they strive to move beyond today’s ‘mass’ communication programs to serve up individualized customer engagement that’s contextual, ‘in the moment’ marketing, creating customer experiences that are unique to each customer or prospect.

Customer evolution:

20 years ago, you would simply visit the customer, showcase your amazing products, and get some orders.
(Remember the old-school order books with carbon paper and 3 copies? Back then I was selling process sensors to the industrial and manufacturing markets. As a sales engineer, I would visit a new client and do a physical demo about our industrial sensors, armed and ready with my brown order book!) 

10 years ago, you would visit the customer, try to understand his needs, highlight your product’s benefits, build a relationship, and get some orders. 

Today, you rarely visit the customer, have a mix of emails and phone calls with which to understand his pains and frustrations, showcase how your product will solve his pains and frustrations, and hopefully get some orders.

Contextual Marketing and Content Mapping

As history tells us, the more you know about the person you’re selling to and the more you’re able to tailor your offering to his or her circumstances, the higher likelihood of sales success.

The convergence of marketing and sales, combined with the wealth of data that modern technology has made available to prospects, has led to the emergence of new ideas like “social selling” and “smarketing.” The sales rep is no longer in charge; in fact, it’s quite the opposite, as prospects now hold the power. It’s no longer about selling, it’s about helping.

“The successful modern sales professional is an information concierge, a content connoisseur — someone who has deep subject-matter expertise on the buyer and the world in which the buyer exists.” – Jill Rowley

The customer journey has become far more complex. With the Internet giving everyone a voice and an opinion, there is more reason to ensure your product lives up to its expectations. However, although products will need to perform, your customers’ relationship with your brand – their customer experience – will be what will drive brand loyalty and generate advocacy.

“60% of consumers have higher expectations for customer service now than they did just one year ago.” (Parature).

“By 2017, 89% of businesses will compete mainly on customer experience.” (Gartner).

By 2020, customer experience will overtake price and product as the key brand differentiator for B2B.” (Walker).

Personalizing the customer experience is quickly becoming the holy grail of marketing. Content mapping, or mapping your content to each stage of the sales cycle, will become an essential tactic for delivering custom content consistently throughout the selling process.

Keep in mind: according to Demand Metric, 61% of buyers are more likely to do business with companies that deliver custom content — and that number will likely only increase over time.

The content you create needs to be personalized. It needs to be aligned with the wants and needs of your customers (and prospective customers). It needs to resonate with them. It needs to feel like it was created just for them.

So what about the future of sales and customers?

The best way to explain it is: market to the audience of one.

In marketers talk a lot about the crowd, marketing to a broad audience because it will generate more leads. The reality is, your customers don’t want to feel part of a crowd.

They don’t see themselves as a metric or number in a marketing funnel. Potential customers face different challenges every day, have different requirements, different goals and sit at different stages of the buying cycle, so the question is, why do we market to everyone exactly the same?

As a business owner, you need to think about inbound marketing, and how you can move away from marketing to the crowd and towards market to an audience of 1.

Always, make sure your message is incredibly relevant to your target audience: 

  • Are they feeling that you connect with them on a personal level? 
  • Are you talking to their pains, fears, frustrations, irritations, desires, needs and aspirations?

When you’ve done a great job – THEY will identify how your product will eliminate their pains and fears and help reach their aspirations!