It’s undeniable that customer experience is crucial to the success of your brand. In fact, 84% of people say that the experience provided by a business is just as important as its products. 76% admit they would switch to a competitor after just one bad experience.
The numbers speak for themselves. The success of your brand hinges on the ability of frontline sellers to provide the best possible experience for customers. When sales teams fail or start to underperform, you risk sales plummeting and losing previously loyal customers.
Retaining control over the customer experience once your product is in the hands of the retail sales staff can be a challenge for brands, but ensuring that your brand message and USPs are being accurately conveyed to your customers is of paramount importance if you want to secure sales. Fortunately, with sales enablement platforms, there’s a way to make that happen.
The Problem
By the time your product reaches frontline sales staff, months – if not years – of hard work have already been spent on making sure it’s market-ready. The product has been designed and redesigned, marketing and advertising materials have been written and polished, and brand reps have been sent out to educate sellers on exactly what your product does and how it can solve problems for customers.
Everything now hinges on those same salespeople absorbing the information given to them by your reps and transmitting it to customers, creating persuasive customer experiences and putting your product in front of the people who need it. A highly informed sales team full of brand advocates can propel your product forwards, ensuring your sales goals are met and exceeded, and that all your hard work is rewarded.
How Things Go Wrong
Once your brand reps have spoken to retail staff, the information they imparted declines fast. In fact, according to a report by Xerox, 87% of sales training content is forgotten in a month. Combine this with the notoriously high staff turnover in the retail sector and you’re quickly staring at a situation where retail salespeople no longer know what your products can do for customers.
As a result, customer experience can start to suffer. Sellers who are unable to clearly explain to customers how your product can benefit them leave them unconvinced and unwilling to make a purchase, resulting in lost sales and poor brand visibility.
Worse, poorly informed sellers are likely to recommend your product to people who don’t need it or are really looking for something else. This results in dissatisfied customers complaining about the quality of your products, or even returning them to the store. One consequence of this can be negative feedback, which can affect your brand’s reputation.
By the time you become aware of these problems they may already be too entrenched to fix. Sending brand reps back out to stores is expensive, time-consuming, and isn’t always effective.
On top of this, communication between brands and retailers can be tenuous, making it difficult to intervene once things have started going wrong. In order to regain control over the customer experience and boost your flagging sales, you need to bridge the communication gap. Sales enablement platforms can help you to do just that.
Taking Back Control
By improving the flow of communication between your brand and frontline sellers, sales enablement tools make it possible for you to stay up to date with how your sales teams are performing and respond to issues as they arise. By enabling brands to rapidly identify underperforming sales teams and reach out to them to understand where things are going wrong, SEPs allow you to plug gaps in your sales team’s knowledge, whether by encouraging your sellers to revisit important promotional materials or by providing them with the additional information they need to do your products justice.
By providing easy access to promotional materials and useful video content, as well as deploying advanced gamification techniques designed to improve recall of key product information, the best sales enablement platforms can prevent the knowledge decay that drives poor customer experiences and damages your brand.
By bringing these capabilities together into a single software platform, Myagi makes it possible for brands to collaborate with their frontline sellers to ensure that they can produce the best possible experiences for your customers. This results in higher sales, happier customers and a highly successful product rollout.
To discuss the ways Myagi can ensure your customers get the best possible experience, get in touch with a member of our team.