Why fill in an assessment and get nothing out of it?

Customers are increasingly aware of sales and marketing techniques to generate new business leads and are correspondigly reticent to invite unwanted email spam or cold calls while they’re in the fact finding stage of the buying cycle.  This makes prospects reluctant to share their personal details with an organisation they don’t know.  However, there are very good reasons why customers should take a little time to engage with assessments as they provide a key source of value exchange  for both the customer and the company.  They might want your services; you might want them as a new company, but until somebody gives something the relationship can’t move foreward.

What is value exchange and what are the different types? 

Value exchange between clients and companies is one of the most basic concepts of 21st Century marketing. The deal on the table is a straight swap of a customers’ cash, time, or key information for a preferential customer experience.
It makes sense to view value as a trade-off between what a customer stands to receive from the exchange and what a customer is expected to provide your company with. The most effective type of exchange is one that gives the most benefit to your customers in exchange for the smallest amount of data, personal information, or whatever else you are expecting to gain from the exchange.
It’s generally regarded that there are three types of value exchange which benefit both parties as follows:

1. The Cash Exchange

The oldest form of exchange in sales and marketing, quite simply this is an exchange of cash for products or services.

2. The Data Exchange

The exchange of client data for a gift, reward or benefit. This is a highly effective way of facilitating business transactions and continuing customer loyalty and engagement.

3. The Promise Exchange

The customer provides data or feedback through a range of assessment methods such as, online or paper surveys, social media exchanges or apps, in exchange for the promise that their assessment data will help to develop strategies for improved customer service.
We’re going to focus on The Promise Exchange, as in the past, the promise exchange has largely been an afterthought – something it would be valuable for an organisation to obtain, but not essential. However, the promise exchange is becoming increasingly important and is currently one of the major goals in modern selling practices.

So what can The Promise Exchange do for the client and the company?

The promise exchange enables a company to facilitate deeper relationships and develop lasting client engagement. Information harvested during the promise exchange through surveys, feedback assessments and the like instils higher expertise in your staff, using customer intelligence to inform future customer practice, which in turn can help to ensure longevity of client to business relationships.

How can The Promise Exchange be facilitated?

The Promise Exchange isn’t always easy to facilitate, let alone sustain. In order for the exchange to be successful, customers are going to need to shift ingrained perceptions of how companies may use information provided through assessments, and begin to trust that the data they're sharing is going to be used in a manner that will be advantageous to them in the future.
Fortunately, the advent of the web and social media offers innovative new ways to gather and analyse client data – data that may be more valuable than you think  in improving customer to business relationships in the future. What’s more, customers are now much more willing to engage with companies using these methods as opposed to traditional marketing methods such as tele-marketing Consumers have a growing appreciation and understanding of the role they have to play in unlocking higher expertise from companies, and so are more likely to engage than in the past.

And lastly….

If you’re using assessments as a source of lead generation, remember to keep the company’s side of the bargain by delivering on your promise – provide meaningful insight in exchange for their participation, use the information sensitively to tailor your approach to the prospect, adapt and personalise your strategy so the customer knows you have valued the time they took to fill out the assessment, otherwise you risk losing valuable customers before you really get started. The Promise Exchange, like any promise, needs to be kept in order that trust is not broken and longer term relationships can endure.

 

How to Reconnect with and Win Back Lost Customers

Losing customers from time to time is, unfortunately, inevitable.  Even with the best will, and perhaps even the best product or service in the world, you are still going to experience some level of churn in your entrepreneurial journey.

However, rather than simply sitting back and accepting that a few of your once-loyal customers have veered from your path, you will be pleased to learn that there are a number of efforts you can make to win them back. Let’s take a look…

How to Reconnect with and Win Back Lost Customers 

Identification 

Your first challenge, of course, is to identify exactly who and where your lost customers are.
This might not be too difficult if you’ve been organised, for you will of course have been keeping a spreadsheet or some other database in which all customer details, both existing and past, are stored for future reference.
If you haven’t got one of those, then not to worry, all is not lost.
Instead, start by digging out your sales records (surely you keep those!). Pore over them, and make a new spreadsheet that contains a list of any customers who have gone quiet for a while. It might be a bit of a manual task that consumes a few hours of your time, but it’s nonetheless a necessary one, for you will be left with a list of prime targets for your reconnection campaign.
With this list in hand, you can now head onto your social networks and locate your targets.
Before you reach out, however, the next step is to conduct some self-analysis.

Find Out Why They left 

No one will simply give up on you without reason – so find out what the reason is.
Is your pricing too high? Your service out of date? Does one of your competitors offer a better solution than you?
The key here is to be honest with yourself. Conduct a SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats) analysis to try and assess exactly why your service or product is no longer perceived to have the best value to your lost customers.
The trick is to put yourself in your customers’ shoes. It can be hard to be objective in this sense – and if it’s too difficult, then assign the task to someone else, or indeed take a closer look at any complaints that you have received to try and unearth your most likely weaknesses there.

Get Back in Touch 

The next phase is to reach out to your lost customers. With your SWOT analysis completed objectively, you will have a pretty good idea as to how they might be feeling, but you won’t ever be entirely sure until you actually ask them.
You can do this through social media, or it may be more appropriate to send a personalized email. In your message, you should ask the lost customer if they wouldn’t mind jumping on a quick call – for which you may even reward them with some sort of coupon or voucher – to talk through exactly what it was they were no longer happy with.
You might think that your hit rate for these types of calls would be pretty low, but you will actually be surprised at how well a customer loyalty initiative such as this will be received. And an added benefit of doing this, of course, is that even if you don’t manage to win them back, you will at least leave them with a better feeling about your business and your attention to customer service, which will not harm your reputation one bit.

Make Them a Great Offer 

In the B2C realm, great offers are pretty easy to come up with. Discounts and coupons are very simple to organize and distribute, and you will have no problem coming up with something very attractive that will be hard for your customers to refuse.
In the B2B space, however, you’re going to have to be a little more creative. Discounts, of course, will still speak very loudly, but perhaps you could offer something along the lines of a free assessment of their business’s situation and needs. A free report or white paper that shares invaluable insights about their industry might also be well received, and can be particularly effective if it explains in no uncertain terms exactly how your service will continue to benefit their business.

Introduce a Loyalty Program 

One of the best ways, of course, to not have to go through the trouble of trying to reconnect with and win back old customers is to not lose them in the first place, and introducing a loyalty program to your business model is one sure fire way to cut down on your customer churn rate.
Of course, there’s nothing to stop you extending the benefits of your loyalty program to those lost customers you’re trying to reconnect with, and indeed this may well be just the offer that they’re looking for to come back to you.
You can launch your loyalty program through an email campaign, through your website, your social networks, or any combination of the above. However you do it, you will at the very least be encouraging your existing customers to re-engage with your content. But, furthermore, you will also be encouraging those that have left you to at least pay you a revisit, take a look around to see what you have to offer and explore the benefits and rewards of doing business with you once more. And if you create the right package, this could be a really attractive opportunity for them indeed.

Want to do more to nurture your business relationships? Check out the LeadSeed sales and marketing platform to find out how our solution can help you. And please use our Contact Page to reach out. 

What Are the Differences Between Social Leads and Social Selling? 

All industries and disciplines the world over have their very own sets of jargon that simply aren’t used anywhere else. Before I started writing blogs for a living, I earned my wage slugging it out in restaurant kitchens, and so of course I could tell you the differences between mirepoix, julienne, brunoise, paysanne, macedoine, chiffonade and jardinere when it comes to preparing your vegetables. In the world of poetry (in which I do also occasionally dabble), it’s important to know your caesuras from your enjambment, your sonnets from your villanelles, and your iambic pentameter from your anapaestic tetrameter.

All of these things, of course, mean little and hold even less interest to those who have no use for them. But here you are with your marketer’s cap on, and all of sudden you’ve discovered that there’s a whole set of terminology that’s completely esoteric to the content marketing world, and the call to educate yourself before you become completely overwhelmed is strong.
Keywords, SEO, SEM, CMSs, leads, internal links and anchor text – there’s a lot to get your head around.
But this post isn’t a jargon buster (though here’s a good one from Matthew Woodward for your reference). However, I am writing today to unearth the differences between two often-confused though crucially distinct marketing terms – “social leads” and “social selling”.

What Are the Differences Between Social Leads and Social Selling?

Let’s start by understanding a fundamental difference between these two terms from a simple grammatical perspective, as I think it will make things easier as we continue.
A “social lead” is a noun, and “social selling” is a verb. That is to say that a “social lead” is a thing, and “social selling” is something that you do (to the thing in question, as it happens).
With me so far? Good – let’s elaborate.

What Are Social Leads?

In marketing terms, a “lead” is a person who has expressed some sort of interest in a business. Therefore, a “social lead” is a person who has expressed some sort of interest in a business via a social network.
What matters for you as a marketer is the process of “social lead generation”.
Social lead generation (and we’re into verb territory now) is the practice of vying for consumer attention on social media. Marketers go about this in many ways – from sharing blog posts to creating exclusive competitions, from engaging in Twitter chats, LinkedIn Group discussions and subreddits to creating how-to videos on YouTube, and from using targeting tools like Facebook Custom Audiences to answering consumer questions as they are raised across the various networks.
All of this (and more) is the process generating consumer interest in the business, and raising awareness about the associated brand. This is social lead generation, and the interested consumers are what’s known as social leads.

So What’s Social Selling? 

Social selling is what the sales team attempts to do to the social leads – i.e. sell them a product or a subscription to a service via social media.
It’s important in the modern world of the empowered consumer that social leads are generated before any hard efforts at social selling take place. The reason for this can be attributed to the evolution of social media itself. In the past, there was only a very limited amount of product or service information that a potential buyer had access to. Marketers created newspaper ads and TV commercials, conducted cold-calling marathons and email blasts, all with the purpose of dazzling consumers with inherently biased product information that painted the brand in a favorable light.
However, today, inbound marketing reigns supreme, for potential customers research product details via Google, and, importantly, use social media to consult their peers about the quality of what’s on offer and the customer service they can expect. Put simply, the modern consumer doesn’t want to hear a sales pitch any longer – if they want to buy something, they’ll do the research themselves.
It is for this reason that social lead generation has evolved like it has. With so many conversations taking place on social media, with brand names being mentioned and products being muddied and praised on a minute-by-minute basis, the marketer now has a wealth of data that can be utilised to target specific social leads and prep them for a sale.

The Worlds of Sales and Marketing Combined 

Social selling is an effective strategy that modern businesses need to embrace. Indeed, a study by Liz Gelb-O’Connor, VP of Inside Sales Strategy and Growth at ADP, finds that companies who embrace social selling have a 50% higher chance of reaching their sales targets. Furthermore, a separate study from LinkedIn about the State of Sales in 2016 reveals that 63.4% of social sellers experience an increase in company revenue.
Understanding the differences between social leads and social selling is the first step, and I hope that this blog post has revealed these to you. But, in order to start putting social lead generation and social selling into practice, you need first of all embrace the knowledge that, although the terms represent two different things, they each in fact make up one half of the same coin.
Generating social leads is all about customer engagement. You create interesting content (like this blog post right here!) and share it on social. From there you monitor which of your following engages with it, and then you reach out to them. You start a conversation, and nurture this lead into a sales-ready lead, and from there you strive to make the sale through the very social network that the customer discovered you on. Indeed, the name of the game in social selling is about developing meaningful trust in the lead generation stage, and then sealing the deal seamlessly.
Together, marketing (i.e. the social lead generators) and sales (i.e. the social sellers) should be cooperating to construct meticulously planned social media campaigns that guide leads down the sales funnel towards an ultimate conversion. It starts with the creation of great, informative and useful content, progresses to the formation of a solid fan base, and ends with a big boost in social sales.
Do you want to drive more social sales with better, more accurate lead generation? Take a look at the LeadSeed sales and marketing platform. Our service delivers better qualified new business leads and strengthens customer relationships. Get in touch to find out more.