💥 High-Performing teams are built on human connection!
The pandemic proved you don’t need that expensive office space to get the job done — but something is missing. There are no more spontaneous conversations happening. No more office culture. No quick gather meetings to correct or brainstorm operational or customer issues. After spending some reflecting and using my experience to write my latest article, please take a read of my thoughts below….
How do you build human connection in a digital world?
That is required for definite to ensure your products and their process interactions are maintained to deliver your customer requirements regardless of change. In this new era of of the digital ‘normal’ customers reign. The future of selling is not just about hitting numbers, It’s about selling the value of your products and services to achieve customer success
But how do we make that success happen?
To make that success possible while ensuring predictable growth, your top talent must be secured, and recurring revenue models employed, and new opportunities explored. Equally as important, the right metrics need to be tracked to gauge success and ensure that customers are receiving true value.
But how do we take that into the digital world?
When we are selling our products and services but can’t conduct that face-to-face human connection, how can we make that work in the hybrid world, and support customers or demonstrate the latest issues or advancements in the market. Also, focus has shifted to long-term customer success, employee retention and pivoted to offer digital-first entry to products and services — but what does this mean for your sales metrics?
We need to start thinking about how to combine all customer engagement data and create customer relationship dashboards that show the full picture of success and value to the internal and external customer.
Combining both my reflection and experience…..
At the maturing stage of my career, I have had to embrace and invest in technology like never before. Also, I made a business core value promise that I needed t to work closer than ever with our customers, to assure of our business continuity and supply as well as support and navigate through these ever changing and demanding times.
My five key takeaways from this period are;
1. Returning and recurring revenue.
What is it? Working closer than ever before to ensure return business is fluid and revenue is recurring.
Why does it matter? Firstly, recurring revenue is easily managed digitally, which aligns with the shift to widespread digital adoption of both buyers and sellers. Secondly, it attracts buyers with lower-cost, incremental spend, smooth transactions. Lastly, it generates predictable revenue for sellers — and makes accurate budgeting and sales forecasting easier.
2. Customer value
What is it? Instead of prioritising one-off transactional sales, customer value accounts for all likely customer purchases from a single company based on past purchase behaviour.
Why does it matter? For sellers, the appeal of maximising customer value is business resilience, fuelled by steady revenue. While prospecting and one-off sales will never go away, a bottom line dependent on the consistent purchase behaviour of loyal customers means predictable revenue and more accurate forecasting.
3. Customer retention/churn
What is it? Customer retention is the percentage of customers that remain active buyers customer churn is the opposite — the rate at which customers stop doing business with you. Both can be used to track the length of a customer’s relationship with a company.
Why does it matter? Given the fresh emphasis on customer value, customer retention is absolutely key. This replaces transactional customer satisfaction with a renewed focus on long-term relationship-building. As noted above, long term value, that builds working partnerships and allows for predictable growth and business resilience.
4. Early warning signs
What is it? Make sure that you are monitoring and measuring your customer service levels, interactions and order patterns. These measures identify changes in customer purchase patterns that may indicate waning interest in your products or services – a danger to predictable revenue.
Why does it matter? To maximise customer value, businesses must be laser focused on customer success. While measures like customer satisfaction can trigger reactive efforts to repair damaged relationships, early warning signs are proactive, allowing businesses to meet the requirements and expectations of customers before mounting frustration leads to churn.
5. Employee retention/churn
What is it? Much like customer retention, employee retention is paired with churn to gauge staff tenure. Some companies combine this with employee value, though that’s much harder to gauge as employees can unpredictably change roles or job functions nowadays.
Why does it matter? Top talent is very hard to find. With virtual teams struggling to stay engaged without in-person collaboration, it’s also hard to keep talent on board. Also, every successful business is in the market to recruit the best available talent, so attracting top talent is harder than ever before..
Along with my 5 key points made and all the technological advances which have certainly helped us through this testing time, selling value through the ‘human connection’ can never be under estimated.
At Polyblend, our aim has always been to focus on relationship-building to create long-term working partnerships with customers. We have adapted this further with advancements in the new digital age and our customers, who are now more considered than ever before.
So, what changes have you made your ways of working to maintain selling value to your customers?
