The secret to making it in the digital sales world: The human touch
Successful
B2B sales teams strike the human-digital balance customers want in three core
areas: speed, transparency, and expertise.
The CEO of a large
industrial company recently posed a question: “My face-to-face sales force
thinks everything should be analog. For years, they’ve successfully driven
consultative sales relationships based on face-to-face conversations, and they
think they should carry on. Meanwhile, my e-commerce business unit thinks we
should convert everything to digital because that’s where the growth is. Who’s
right?”
The short answer is,
“Both.” The realities on the ground, however, make it hard for sales leaders to
understand what they actually need to do, especially when different parts of
the organization have a vested interest in pushing different sides of the
human-vs.-digital debate.
There’s no doubt that
digital is rocket fuel for sales organizations. B2B sales leaders using digital
effectively enjoy five times the growth of their peers who are not at the cutting edge of digital
adoption. But a recent McKinsey survey of B2B customers highlighted a more
nuanced reality. What customers most desire is great digital interactions and the
human touch.
The implication is that
B2B sales companies have to use technology to power and optimize both digital
and human interactions. Companies that add the human touch to digital sales
consistently outperform their peers. They achieve five times more revenue,
eight times more operating profit, and, for public companies, twice the return
to shareholders. That data holds true over a four- to five-year period.
Many sales
organizations, however, have trouble putting this human-digital program into
practice. The truth is that there are no tried-and-true methods. Companies need
to create the human-digital blend that is most appropriate for their business
and their customers. This should not be a random process of trial-and-error
testing. What is needed is a systematic way to evaluate the optimal
human-digital balance.
It’s not who, it’s when
The majority of B2B
companies want both human and digital interactions on their buying journey,
according to a recent McKinsey survey. Their specific preference at any
given time is primarily correlated with the stage of the buying journey.
When customers are
researching a new product or a service, for example, two-thirds of those who
lean more towards digital still want human interaction. As customers move into
the evaluation and active-consideration stages, digital tools that provide
information, such as a comparison tool or online configurator, come into their
own, especially when combined with a highly skilled sales force.
After the purchase,
when discussions are about renewal, cross-selling, and upselling, the tables
are turned completely, and 85 percent of those who lean overall towards human
interaction now prefer digital. Yet most B2B companies still reward reps more
for spending time keeping customers loyal and repurchasing than for uncovering
new customer needs or driving demand, which is exactly where customers say they
want face-to-face expertise. The key message for sellers is that context
matters more than customer type and much more than industry. Companies that are
digital from start to finish today could see even higher growth if they
reintroduce the human touch to the start of the buying journey. Conversely, if
companies are firmly holding customers’ hands via key-account managers or value-added
resellers, they should be aware that customers are saying loudly and clearly
that they don't value that close personal attention after the sale.
What do customers want?
Customers want a great
digital experience and a great human experience. Be careful,
though. We asked customers “What annoys you most?” and gave them a large number
of possible answers, including price. A third said “Too much contact”—by far
the single biggest answer.
The trick is to
understand where human interaction is most wanted and invest
there—be it in expertise available via a web chat, ensuring a speedy response
to customer-service queries, or simply having a person pick up the phone when a
potential customer rings.
Companies also need to
invest in digital, but those investments should focus on two places. First,
where digital is most valued by customers: enabling speedy purchases and
repurchases, delivering online tools for customer service, or offering
real-time pricing with product configurators. Second, where digital can enable
humans to do a better job of interacting with customers when the human touch is
required.
Since many B2B customers still want human interaction
at some stage of their customer journey, sellers need to offer multiple routes
to market with both human and digital resources available at all stages at
varying degrees of intensity. The challenge is ensuring seamless transitions
and handoffs from one stage to the next so that customers are neither repeating
themselves nor frustrated at delays.
The implications for
employees are substantial. Sales reps need to focus their efforts on expertise,
on being more consultative, and on responding quickly. Compensation structures
may well have to change, too. If reps become less important at the point of
purchase, then the commission model will need to evolve.
From our research and
experience, three traits have emerged that should be core ingredients of every
company’s optimal human-digital blend: speed, transparency, and expertise.
The need for speed
Slow turnaround times
are frustrating, and slow means more than 24 hours, even for B2B customers.
Companies need to think about having 24-hour expertise available on call, with
superexperts, who can answer customer questions in real time, sitting with the
sales or customer-service team. Digitally enabled tools can help enormously,
for example by connecting customers with experts via a web chat.
Even when customers are
doing extensive online research, there usually comes a point when they want a
question answered quickly. This could be online, through the company website’s
FAQs or product pages, or through contact with a real person. Yet most B2B
companies have yet to perfect their online content to answer all questions, and
even fewer have reconfigured their traditional inside sales channels or
web-chat tools to deliver highly technical expertise on demand.
Once customers are set
on making a purchase, they want to do it fast. One-click purchases or shortcuts
for repeat orders (even for large capital purchases) can speed up the process
tremendously. If customers are on a company’s website but have to buy from a
distributor, they need to be able to reach the appropriate page on the
distributor’s website quickly and smoothly. If there are changes to the RFP,
customers expect an almost instantaneous turnaround or, better still, an online
space where buyer and seller can solve the problems in real time. Customers we
spoke to complained a lot about being unable to make a quick change, whether
they were buying in person or digitally.
Finally, speed is vital
in repurchase and postpurchase troubleshooting. Four times as many B2B buyers
would buy directly from suppliers’ websites if that option were available (and
fast). They are especially keen on it for repeat purchases.
For postpurchase needs,
speed can come from something as simple as having better FAQs, or from a
well-run forum where customers can solve one another’s problems online.
Increasingly, it means using chat bots, which can often answer a lot of
customers’ queries, or at least ensure they are directed to the best place or
person as quickly as possible.
One B2B retailer
changed how it offers online support by crowdsourcing improvements to its FAQs
and offering a small reward as an incentive to engage. It also interviewed
customer-facing staff to prioritize customers’ pain points. It then updated the
FAQs based on this feedback and cross-referenced the answers with the service
calls that had the highest-rated resolutions to ensure the content was correct.
Finally, and perhaps most simply of all, the company moved the FAQs to a more
prominent place on its e-commerce site.
These relatively inexpensive
and straightforward changes reduced the volume of calls and messages to its
customer care center by a staggering 90 percent, since customers could now
quickly find the answers to their problems. This success allowed the retailer
to shift support capacity to work with the key-account teams on strategic
accounts.
Transparency matters
Customers want
transparency. They want to know at a glance the difference between what they
have today and what they could have tomorrow, and they want to know what the
total cost is. Digital tools make product comparison and price transparency
easy and can be used both by customers directly and by sales reps working with
clients, blending the digital and human. For example, in more transactional
situations or for general comparison and evaluation, customers want to be able
to look online for pricing or use configurators to generate pricing for
comparisons. In more complex or consultative situations, face-to-face or inside
sales reps might access online configurators or pricing tools in collaboration
with a customer.
The importance of
transparency extends to resellers. Our research shows that customers still
judge companies on pricing transparency at their resellers. If the reseller
lacks a good product-comparison engine, a good configurator, easy-to-understand
pricing, or easy-to-build quotations, then in the customer’s mind it’s the same
as if the company was managing the sales process itself. One option is to let
customers use your site to do their comparisons; the other is to find out where
customers struggle on the reseller’s site and invest in helping the reseller
overcome the problem.
Whatever the specific
situation, it is critical to control as much of the process as you can, and to
influence what you cannot directly control. One software company realized it
wasn’t converting small- and medium-sized business customers from consideration
to purchase. Its one-size-fits-all approach to product recommendations meant
that SMB customers saw the same offers as enterprise-level customers and thus
had no clarity on which elements might be priced differently if applied to
them. So they took their business elsewhere. It was time for a change.
The company set up a
“trial and buy” website specifically geared to small- and medium-size
businesses. It asked customers to fill in a brief form to assess their needs
and made offers based on their answers, with clear pricing for each package and
a clear explanation of how each package was different. This approach helped the
company open up a whole new segment. Within three months, 90 percent of SMB
buyers were first-time customers. Those customers whose needs were seemingly
too complex for an off-the-shelf package were routed to a team of inside sales
experts who were able either to direct them to the right standard package or to
configure a solution to meet their needs. This ability to “triage” customers
into those who need more human help versus those who can be well served with
digital tools can significantly improve customer experience and conversion.
Digital to support your experts
Today’s account
managers need to be experts, and digital tools can help them provide their
expertise to their customers. The human conversation facilitates and drives the
customization, while the digital tools bring the quick visualization and
specifications—including pricing tradeoffs—into sharp relief. Neither works
without the other.
A senior account
manager at an audiovisual company was sitting down with a customer’s team. On
her tablet was a product configurator, and during a three-hour meeting, she was
able to use the live configurator to redesign the product in line with the
customer’s evolving requirements. The pricing updated in real time, the
ancillary products and services that would complement the new system were
included, and everyone around the table could talk about what they were seeing
on the tablet. Such an exchange might have taken two to three weeks just a few
years ago.
At a medical-products
company, sales reps brought their expertise to surgeons, helped by a complex
configurator and visualization tool. They were able to help the surgeons pick
precisely the right product for particular patient segments (based on
demographics and diagnosis) and show them a video game that demonstrated
connecting the device to the patient. This experience boosted surgeon
satisfaction with the company by 10 percent, and sales by 12 percent. Moreover,
the surgeons rated the reps’ expertise as 30 percent better than that of a
control group armed with just brochures and PowerPoint.
The hat trick
Successfully bringing
speed, transparency and expertise into the digital/human blend delights
customers and grows sales. Recent moves by Grainger are a classic example of a
response to all three customer needs simultaneously.
Grainger is one of the
world’s largest providers of maintenance and repair supplies and was one of the
first companies in its sector to seize upon digital as a tool for achieving
both customer intimacy and growth. As far back as 1991, when they provided an
e-catalog on CD-ROM, Grainger has been at the forefront of embracing digital
alongside its core “human” branches and sales reps. Fast-forward to today, when
69 percent of Grainger orders originate via a digitally enabled channel (such
as website, TakeStock, and EDI). But sales and service representatives, along
with local branches, remain integral to the customer experience.
As their ecosystem
evolves, Grainger continues to innovate, launching two businesses that are
fully online only. Monotaro, serving SMBs in the Japan market, and Zoro Tools,
serving SMBs in the United States, are both single-channel online stores. Both
offer only products that are meaningful for this segment, which meant whittling
down tens of thousands of SKUs, simplifying the assortment available, and
increasing the speed at which customers find what they need. Pricing is
transparent, and the purchase process is fast: simply click to buy.
The benefits for
Grainger have been significant. Both Monotaro and Zoro have experienced
double-digit growth as the result of a speedy, transparent, and informative
process (22 percent and 18 percent respectively, 2017 over 2016).
Simultaneously, customers continue to engage in analog experiences, with 32
percent picking up orders either at a branch or via an onsite locker system. The human touch and experience
remain very relevant.
Perhaps the single
biggest lesson from this research is the benefit of asking customers what they
want. We asked them, “What’s the one thing a salesperson could do that you
would really appreciate in terms of how you interact?” Their answer: “Ask me.”
Is it time to ask your
customers whether the monthly meetings you have with them are valuable? Would
they prefer a quick text or email rather than a phone call? Are they aware of
the product wiki you have online? Get the customer involved to find out when to
use digital tools and when they want the human touch.
By Christopher Angevine, Candace Lun Plotkin,
and Jennifer Stanley
https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/marketing-and-sales/our-insights/the-secret-to-making-it-in-the-digital-sales-world?cid=other-eml-alt-mip-mck-oth-1806&hlkid=e669c010188c425d9f677f0ea9694760&hctky=1627601&hdpid=95004f82-a3c1-4bcb-b6b2-7a62cd06bed3
No comments:
Post a Comment