What is hyper-personalization in sales?

Today’s business buyers are accustomed to personalized buying experiences. We all experience the convenience and speed of consumer transactions in our personal lives, and have come to expect it in the workplace as well. Salesforce found that 80% of customers say the experience a company provides is as important as its products and services. The same study also revealed 70% of customers want a seamless experience throughout their buying journey. This includes contextualized engagement based on earlier interactions, which was found to be very important to winning their business.

It used to be sufficient to personalize communications by simply using the customer’s name. Now, marketing must gather and leverage multitudes of data to gain behavior and intent insights that allow improved interactions with prospects and customers at every stage of the buying process. But, what happens after leads are handed to sales? Are reps able to provide the same level of hyper-personalization for a consistent buyer experience? With the assistance of technology, it’s possible.

What’s involved in hyper-personalization?

Marketing has used data to personalize communications for years. In fact, the amount of data and insights that are both available and utilized continue to increase. Recently, the advent of artificial intelligence has allowed marketers to better determine buyer intent and personalize more efficiently. When combined with target buyer personas, as well as systems to effectively gather and employ data, hyper-personalization is possible. Hyper-personalization allows marketers to go beyond simple name and location personalization with use of browsing behavior data, social media, and activities on other communication channels.

Some of these insights are gathered in marketing automation platforms along with other methods such as call recordings and email communications. They then need to be analyzed to become usable customer data. In fact, some of these insights may be gained through conversation intelligence like conversationAI. This allows sales to leverage this valuable information even after the prospect reaches the later stages of the buying process.

Extreme personalization by sales through to the close

Once a lead is passed from marketing to sales, marketing can continue to support personalization through automation. Rather than directly engaging with prospects, marketing can supply sales with data and insights that create better conversations and ideally result in sales wins.

This supply of information from marketing reduces the amount of time reps on prospect research, which frees them to increase the amount of time they spend actually speaking with prospects. Then, the ability to incorporate deeper personalization in these interactions with potential customers allows them to provide more value, increasing the odds of closing each deal.

This data sharing allows reps to garner a deeper understanding of their prospect’s wants and needs based on their previous interactions and engagements. They can then focus on creating a mean meaningful conversation around those needs to drive interest. It makes reps look like they spent hours doing research when, in fact, automation provides what they need for a superior customer experience.

Want your reps to become the salesperson that prospects want to talk to? Provide them with the contextual data they need. This allows them to give buyers the information, insights, and solutions they really want while closing more business. Start doing this so your reps can hyper-personalize all their prospect interactions too.