Tips for Personalizing the B2B Customer Experience
Whether you’re selling B2B or B2C, ultimately, you’re selling to a person and today’s buyers expect a personalized experience.
The push for personalization results in many B2B organizations leveraging some common B2C tactics—turning to social media, peer recommendations, and available thought leadership content to gain control of their buying process and gather insights from their colleagues.
How to Make the B2B Customer Experience Memorable
In the age of the educated purchaser, what should you be doing to stand out? Here are a few tips for personalizing your B2B buying process with today’s sophisticated buyer (hint – it all boils back down to the experience):
Make Building Your Customer Relationships the Number One Priority
Business buyers are people too. Like a B2C buyer thoroughly researches a car before making the purchase, B2B buyers do complex research online and through peers on products before talking to a vendor. Make your presence known across multiple channels. Usually, when they pick up the phone to call a vendor, they know what they want to buy, and they’re ready to buy it. However, the final piece to any B2B buyer’s journey is to develop a relationship before signing the papers.
Put your priority on developing the relationship with the decision-maker and other influencers in the organization, build trust. Even after the purchase, ensure the customer knows they can come to you for advice. This relationship not only paves the way for long-term sales but can serve as a differentiator when your customer’s peers are evaluating and researching new products of their own. If they go to your customer for suggestions, you know who will be at the top of their list.
Align Your Sales and Marketing to Meet Your Customer Needs
The lack of communication and alignment between sales and marketing isn’t a new problem. However, as we move toward a new era in which digital reigns supreme, with potential buyers being more informed now than ever, bridging the gap with a defined service level agreement (SLA) is imperative.
Connect the Customer to the Brand
B2B purchase decisions are no longer just about maximizing business value. While features and functionality are great, they’re not necessarily the main key needed to impress potential customers. B2B customers are surprisingly almost 50% more likely to buy a product or service when they see the personal value and eight times more likely to pay a premium for comparable products and services when personal value is present (according to a study by Think with Google). Building an emotional connection with your customer can drive important purchase outcomes in the future.
Personalize the Experience with Marketing Automation
Overall, customer experience is part of every aspect of your business. While having tools in place such as marketing automation enables a better customer experience, it still takes you as the marketer or seller to create and make the experience memorable.
Providing a robust and personalized B2B customer experience starts with marketing and sales alignment and established processes and connections along the way. Once you’ve done the work to develop these processes and build relationships, you can use marketing automation software such as Sugar Market to keep everything on track.
