How to Become a Sense Maker to Your Prospects and Buyers

Today's blog post is by Austin Ries, a content marketing manager for Zoho. You can connect with him on LinkedIn. 

 

If you’re in sales and you feel like it’s getting harder to win deals, it’s not just you. The world of buying and selling has gotten much more complex. That’s why we’re focused on empowering salespeople to help prospects and customers make sense of a complex world. Our offerings help sales teams do that in three ways. 

Three Ways to Become a Sense Maker for Customers

1. Increase trust and lower skepticism. Recent Gartner research shows that customer skepticism of brands is high, despite the proliferation of high-quality and readily-available information about offerings and purchase options. Their recommendation is to help prospects make sense of their options.  A good integrated CX platform that aligns every customer interaction gives  salespeople insight into what information customers already have. If customers have raised questions, the platform will let salespeople know; which opens up opportunities for salespeople to reach out not just with another white paper or case study, but to answer the customer’s specific question.
    
2. Get insight into your customer’s emotions and sentiments. Again, the salesperson who sends the most information is not necessarily going to walk away with the deal. Buyers won’t make time to have conversations with salespeople who waste their time or can’t bring an additional level of value to the conversation. That’s why it can be so helpful to use a CRM solution with embedded AI technology that not only provides sales reps with data about the sale at hand, but also analyzes language in the email to detect the emotional tone and overall mood of the customer. With this insight, reps can prioritize customers who need help identifying value, and plan an appropriate response based on their sentiment.
   
   
3. Create fluid internal conversations. Nothing annoys buys prospects more than getting the same message from multiple people on your team. The less in sync you are with your team, the more disorganized you look to your customer. Avoid sending duplicate messages and annoying customers by unifying your customer-facing teams with a single technology stack. Conversations will be  fluid across reps and departments, so customers never receive duplicates of the same ebook or testimonial.

Sales Success Today is about Making Human Connections 

When customers are struggling to make sense of information and reconcile inconsistencies, effective sellers can use this moment to stand out by making a human connection. 

Instead of overwhelming the customer with additional content or data to dispute a competitor's claims, guide them through the evaluation process, fight the urge to tell them what to think, and patiently work to find answers that guide them to a purchasing decision they won't later regret.  

Sense-making sellers will be the salespeople of the future. As AI continues to advance and handle more mundane daily tasks, reps can focus their attention on developing and utilizing these types of skills to connect with customers with empathy and authenticity. 

Along with empathy, being a Sense Maker requires active listening and creative problem-solving. The good news for sales reps is that these are the skills they use every day, and soon will help them get to the end of the tunnel faster with happier customers on the other side. 

Your customers deserve a better experience, and with Zoho CRM Plus, you can give it to them. Sign up for a free trial today and learn how a unified technology stack can accelerate upmarket growth.