How to improve your B2C sales process
Did you know more than 65% of people have higher expectations for customer service today than they did three to five years ago and 83% of consumers say that good customer service is the most important factor (outside of price and product) when deciding what to buy?
So if you manage a B2C brand, it’s important to remember that simply following a sales process and going through the motions isn’t going to get you more customers. The thing that’s really going to move the needle within your business is how well you can serve your customers.
Do you know how to serve them in the best way possible, and are you refining your internal processes to ensure your B2C sales staff are always equipped with the knowledge they need to know to deliver the best service they can?
If you answered no to any of the above, don’t worry, you’re in the right place. In this article, we’ll take you through the tactics our B2C clients use to improve their B2C sales process and convert more customers.
#1 Work backwards from your audience’s pain points to improve your B2C sales process
All too often, we see B2C brands jumping straight into their training based on assumptions about what their target market wants or doesn’t want. They might do a week-long training programme about their core values and how to convey these when this isn’t what your customers care about.
To ensure you’re working in the most efficient and effective way possible, you’ve got to tighten your training process by addressing your customer's pain points. Stop making assumptions about what’s bothering them about your sales process, and start asking them. For example, here’s what a survey by Zendesk found:
In this example, it’s clear you need to provide training to your sales associates regarding speed and efficiency. If you don’t, you could waste time creating fancy tactics and strategies to improve your B2C sales process. However, if you don’t fix the basic problem of long wait times, your customers are still going to be frustrated, and this could result in them moving to a different provider.
#2 Improve your B2C sales process by consistently sharing knowledge throughout your organisation
When you work in head office, away from your sales associates, it can be very easy to forget that they weren’t in that board meeting with you, they didn’t read the latest customer insight report, and as a result, valuable information isn’t being shared freely throughout your organisation.
This means only you and other senior members of the team have access to this beneficial information. This isn’t helpful when it’s your sales teams who are the ones that need to hear it.
So stop making your team’s job more difficult by withholding information and start making it easy for them to access the knowledge that you know.
We know that this can be tricky if you run a large organisation, and this is what puts most sales managers off of doing it, but there are tools that make sharing your knowledge quick and painless.
Some of the best B2C sales training apps offer intelligent comms solutions which make sharing knowledge as easy as writing an email. So for something that took you minutes to write and publish, you’ll have a vault of valuable information to support your sales associates for years to come. You make it easy for them to gain information, inspiration and motivation to perform at their best and deliver exceptional service to your customers daily.
#3 Provide sales process training that your associates will actually complete every day
I’m sure you hear this phrase a lot: ‘I don’t have time to learn’. Don’t worry; you’re not alone; this is what many B2C sales managers struggle with because their teams always say they can’t fit anymore into their schedule. But the harsh truth is that if you want to compete against the big players in your market and dramatically improve your B2C sales process, you’ve got to ensure your sales associates are learning on a weekly, if not daily, basis.
For the majority of sales professionals, 84% of their sales training is forgotten within three months. This means all the work and effort you put into your quarterly training programme is wasted because it is totally forgotten in three months.
How can you ensure your sales associates train frequently and remember what they’ve learnt?
Our clients use a 3-step approach to keep up a consistent habit of learning; here’s what it looks like
They use microlearning courses - these are 1-5 minutes long, so employees can complete a module when they have a spare 5 minutes. No more hour-long training courses, tedious presentations and huge workbooks which get lost or ignored. Employees can jump in and out of these when they have time, which means even if they have a minute, they can take some kind of action to improve their knowledge.
They provide a searchable knowledgebase like Google for your business. It has everything your employees need to know when giving incredible service to your customers. Best of all, any article you post here can be repurposed for learning content. No more creating content for two different platforms.
For example, if you post a step-by-step guide on how to find a customer’s file, you can add questions and tasks to this and turn it into a microlearning module. So this doesn’t just mean your employees are learning when they do your quick microlearning course, but it also means they are learning in the flow of work when they look up any help sheet on your digital knowledgebase.
They use alerts and reminder features to keep employees on track - rather than publishing some training and hoping that your sales associates will take action and learn it, they use our communication features to keep everyone on track. What do we mean by this? Well, they can track who has read what on the knowledgebase, making it easy to see who’s staying updated and who’s not.
They can create clickable banners on the app's homepage, reminding employees of what learning course or article they need to be updated on. They can simply click and be taken right where they need to go.
Little markers make it easy to see which updates they have and haven’t read so they can quickly read the articles they’ve missed.
Notifications mean they can create reminders which pop up on the employee’s device, reminding them of what they need to know for the week ahead.
#4 Show your sales associates what good looks like to consistently improve your B2C sales process
You know what good selling looks like, but do you see that behaviour in your staff? Are you becoming frustrated having to remind your regional managers and sales teams of the steps they need to follow to make consistent sales, but there’s no consistency, and the results show?
You’re down on conversions, your customer service is below average and it’s affecting your long-term business growth.
In order to fix this, you’ve got to show your regional managers and employees what ‘the best’ looks like and to do this, you’ve got to package it up into tangible documents or guides which they can access wherever they are.
The most successful B2C brands provides their sales associates with a digital handbook. These give them all the playbooks, sales journeys, products, offers and best practice videos they need to sell confidently and hit their targets faster.
These work so well because you’re not only making your best-practice knowledge accessible, but because it’s digital, you can track whether it’s being read. And for those really important articles, you can add acknowledgements so you can drill down to see exactly who’s engaging and who’s not.
#5 Shine a light on your sales associate’s struggles
Do you ever sit and wonder what your sales associates are thinking? Are you eager to know what they’re struggling with, but you just haven’t got the time to ask?
If you’re like most sales managers, you rush through your day trying to tick as many things from your to-do list so that you can take your team one step closer to hitting their monthly sales quota. In doing so, you completely neglect to look into what might be holding your sales associates back from performing at their best.
One way of doing this is to sit each employee down and take them through a set of questions to try and unearth their biggest sales barriers. However, an easier way is to leverage the clever analytics which are provided on most of the top sales training apps for B2C brands.
They can tell you which articles have been read the most so you gain a clearer understanding of which areas your sales associates need more coaching in. For example, you may notice that the article you wrote on your ‘customer introduction process’ has been read almost double the amount of times compared to your ‘returns policy’ this means you need to provide more training around your customer introduction process as it’s clearly an area your staff are grappling with.
#6 Don’t hold off from tweaking and refining your training materials
When you work in the B2C industry, you’re constantly faced with an audience who are more volatile and impulsive.
One day they might love the fact that you offer free returns because it means they get their item faster. But the next day, they might shun you for it because they heard a segment on the news detailing how badly these offers are impacting the environment.
With this in mind, you must stay ahead of these challenges if you want to improve your B2C sales process. You’ve got to prepare your sales associates for the objections which could make it harder for them to make the sale and the only way to do this is by adapting your training and pushing it out as soon as possible.
Many managers shy away from doing this because they think it takes too long or they have to get sign-off from their comms team, but if you use a sales training app dedicated to B2C sales teams, it means you can tweak your sales training within seconds.
This allows you to remain proactive in your sales training efforts rather than being reactive, which will pay dividends in the future.
#7 Hold your team accountable for their learning
You can develop the best sales process in the world but if your staff aren’t learning about it and keeping their knowledge topped up it will never be effective.
To make sure everyone is on board to improve their knowledge and performance, you’ve got to hold them accountable for their learning. In fact, the American Society of Training and Development (ASTD) did a study on accountability and found that you have a 65% of completing a goal if you commit to someone. And if you have a specific accountability appointment with a person you've committed, you will increase your chance of success by up to 95%.
This is why it’s crucial to use a digital sales training app to track your sales associates' progress. When you both have access to their activity, it makes them more conscious and aware of their efforts. They won’t be able to bluff about taking notes in your presentation or reading that workbook over again because you’ll be able to see what they’ve done.
A great way to hold your sales associates accountable for improving your sales process and staying updated on their training is to hold accountability meetings. In these meetings, you can go through their training and set training goals for their next meeting. This will dramatically improve their engagement levels, and your business performance will improve as a result.
To improve your sales process, you’ve got to improve your training process
To improve your B2C sales process, it’s vital you improve your training process because you work in such a fast-changing industry. What worked today to persuade customers might not work next month, and you need the training tools to make it smooth and simple to adapt your training.
Download the ultimate guide to sales enablement for frontline teams if you’re:
You’re looking for a way to increase sales
You’re interested in making your sales associates more confident and engaged
You’re interested in the benefits your business can reap from a B2C sales enablement platform
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