Your marketing and communications team likely determine your marketing strategy, but it’s the sales team that’s actually talking to leads.

More than anyone, your salespeople have the most interaction with potential clients and that’s why they will know what works, what doesn’t, and even why.

Unfortunately, the sales team is often overlooked when it comes to optimizing the customer journey. They can actually provide invaluable insight and your organization should take full advantage. Here’s how to improve customer experience by leveraging your sales team:

BE CREATIVE

Your sales team shouldn’t be relegated to a windowless room blasting EDM music in between calls. Get them on your blog and in your videos.

Make your salespeople part of the customer experience by allowing them to create content they can share with leads themselves.

It doesn’t need to be anything new – most salespeople have their own decks, scripts, and supplementary material to help them sell. All that needs to be done is repurposing that content to be audience-facing or client-facing.

Giving your salespeople a presence will introduce them to the leads that are already in your funnel. You can then use the data to see if a lead has looked at content published by a member of your sales team, and then ensure that that lead has at least one touch-point with the content’s author.

SEGMENT AND PERSONALIZE MORE

Your salespeople are talking to your leads and buyer personas on a daily basis. This provides an opportunity to create a near endless loop of data and personalization.

Over time, your salespeople may give you enough information to update one or all of your buyer personas.

You will want to start using this information right away in your marketing platform — either by updating the profiles of your current leads or sifting through lists to create new segments.

You can also test the new information with an A/B test or by using multi-variate testing. This is dependent on the size of your email list and the new information available on your persona.

Regardless of how you decide to use the new information, giving your salespeople more say in how your buyer personas are defined will help you personalize your content and campaigns, which ultimately improves the overall customer experience provided.

HAVE A FEEDBACK SYSTEM IN PLACE

A salesperson’s job is to persuade the lead that your product is the solution they’ve been looking for — this is how the sales team impacts customer experience.

If anything gets in the way of sales being able to do what they need to, they need to have support.

The issue could be finding and having access to the content they require to help leads understand how your service can help. In this case, you may need to train them on your content management platform, or come up with a system where they can easily search for posts internally.

Or maybe they simply don’t have optics on the marketing funnel. Then it’s best to set up a sales-specific dashboard with the essential metrics and KPIs they need to track.

By working with your salespeople, you can build a great customer experience that improves your buyer personas, make the sales process smoother and introduce your customers to the people who work behind the scenes.

Maropost is the industry leader in customer service with a marketing cloud, called Maropost for Marketing, that is both easy to use and implement.

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