Is your revenue team ready for what's next?
In many ways, 2020 is a year of hibernation as people delay travel plans, socially distance themselves to prevent the spread of COVID-19, and cancel big events. But for revenue-generating teams of Marketers, Salespeople, and Customer Success professionals, the year turned out to be extremely busy as they rapidly adjusted to new challenges.
We here at Conversica dealt with many of the same challenges facing our customers. Which is why we gathered a short list of suggestions and resources to help customer-facing teams as they enter the new year.
You’re only as strong as your weakest link. So, it’s important to forge a strong connection between Marketing and Sales teams.
451 Research, a part of S&P Global, summarized the tension between these two teams in their Business Impact Brief titled, Bridging Marketing and Sales With Intelligent Virtual Assistants:
“Although marketing and sales teams essentially strive for the same results, they frequently find themselves pulling in different directions… sales teams are not able to work all of the leads that marketing generates. Inefficient lead follow-up, coupled with poor visibility into sales performance, can result in disappointing campaign ROI and diminished lead-conversion rates. This is especially frustrating for marketers who have limited control over which leads sales teams follow up on, yet are held to those conversion rates as a marketing KPI.”
To help bridge this divide, 451 Research recommends adopting technologies that intelligently automate lead outreach, efficiently fill in the pipeline, and provide greater visibility into the sales process. This keeps teams accountable while also giving them the scalability necessary to execute across Sales and Marketing activities.
Beyond technological innovations, it’s also wise to host regular check-ins between Sales and Marketing leaders. This way both teams can better understand where each other are coming from, make decisions together, and make concerted efforts towards the same goals.
To effectively execute your virtual events and webinars, organizations need to promote sessions ahead of time and follow up with attendees afterward. While mass email campaigns can raise awareness for large audiences, they can’t ask the contact if they have any questions or discover handraisers.
Fortunately, Intelligent Virtual Assistants (IVAs) can help organizations get the most value out of their virtual events. The IVA delivers personalized emails designed to drive attendance and motivate would-be attendees to schedule meetings with your Sales team ahead of events. Similarly, the IVA follows up with everyone after the event to see if they have questions, need clarification, or are interested in a demo.
By touching every lead and attendee with an IVA, organizations garner a better return on investment for their events and webinars.
Customer satisfaction, retention, and expansion are always important for business success. However, it’s all the more vital now as the economic downturn makes it more challenging to secure new customers.
It’s up to Customer Success teams to establish healthy relationships with existing customers throughout their lifecycle. This requires building trusted, valued relationships with customers and delivering on the promise given during their initial investment.
But this is easier said than done when you consider that Customer Success representatives only have so many hours in a day to manage high customer-to-rep ratios.
To help alleviate capacity constraints, Customer Success organizations should consider augmenting their team with an Intelligent Virtual Assistant. These IVAs are always persistent, personalized and polite, which is helpful in motivating customers to schedule quarterly business reviews, assisting with onboarding new customers, or even regularly checking in with existing customers to see if they have problems, questions or opportunities for growth.
Intelligent Virtual Assistants take on many of the redundant and time-consuming tasks that inundate Customer Success reps. By automating these duties, representatives can spend more time focusing on customer interactions that build lasting relationships.
As consumers and business professionals shift to a digital-first world, they need more robust tech solutions to help them engage leads and customers in a personalized manner. While simple chatbots have been around for years, these rules-based systems are highly limited in their capabilities. Yes, they can deliver a pop-up message in the corner of the screen. But they can’t engage prospects and customers in two-way, human-like conversations.
Website chat powered by an Intelligent Virtual Assistant, on the other hand, delivers a personalized experience driving contacts to take the next best action. For example, the IVA can direct an inquisitive visitor to your customer case studies, redirect a customer with a question to your Support team, or even identify a hot lead and pass them over to a Salesperson after gathering their contact information—all from the corner of your website window.
IVAs offer a more mature approach to website chat when compared to simple chatbots, which is a big win for companies and customers alike.
No one is certain what the new year will bring, but we are certain that adopting technologies to augmented workforces and better engage leads and customers will be a net benefit in 2021.
Conversica ensures that no lead is left behind. Stop wasting your marketing spend and start finding hot leads anywhere in the funnel. Check out our Marketing Data Sheet for more.
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