Optimize the Customer Sales Experience to Win More. With Jay Baer [Episode 578]

Jay Baer, digital marketing expert, online customer service expert, and author of several NYT bestselling books, including Youtility and Hug Your Haters, joins me on this episode.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

Jay says the single biggest challenge facing sales reps today is a lack of trust in organizations. Research from Nielsen says we trust people twice as much as organizations, so good salespeople are very important now.

As AI becomes more involved in sales, salespeople will see a renaissance. People want genuine conversations with humans. Andy cites Geoff Colvin’s Humans Are Underrated.

KLM is remarkably good with digital social services, especially social media in 14 languages. Their messaging is handled by bots, until a key term or question is used, and the conversation is handed off to a human.

Jay gives lectures on sales and marketing alignment, which he considers incredibly important. Marketing plays deep in the funnel, and sales acts more like marketing. Jay suggests sales and marketing should attend each other’s’ meetings.

Sales and marketing both need to get out of the office and meet customers. Have user conferences and customer conferences, if you can’t get on their turf.

Marketing and sales are not credited for renewals, so they spend their budget on the things that get them compensation. It’s important to keep customers, but nobody organizes their companies to do so. It’s all about acquisition.

Sales requires lots of leads. We have a great understanding on what generates leads but less expertise on what generates renewals. We need a renewals playbook.

80% of marketing digital budgets are on customer acquisition, and they are getting a close rate of 25%. How do we change this poor rate? Poorly qualified leads yield poor results.

The salesperson sets the overall customer expectation. The customer doesn’t care what is written on the website or said in the webinar. If the salesman over-promises, the customer will be unhappy with customer success.

Jay suggests triggers that add humanity to the inhuman process of marketing. Putting a connection to the people behind the product helps.

Humanization adds human characteristics to the organization. Personalization adds relevancy to the customer journey by tailoring the customer experience to the customer.

The uniquely human sales skills and behaviors become more important, not less, as AI comes more into play.