Have you ever wondered how to win more business by communicating with your clients and knowing your clients more?
How do you make your business stand out when there’s a ton of competition?
Listen in on the conversation between SalesNexus CEO Craig Klein and SaaS Story In The Making host Matt Wolach. They discuss how an intimate knowledge of your customer base can help you win more business and keep your customers longer.
In this episode, Craig shares his expertise and advice in adapting your business to the digital world, utilizing CRM tools to your advantage, and the secrets to keeping your customers coming back for more.
Building SalesNexus as an all-in-one tool
For most of our competitors, you get a CRM for your sales team. Then you’re going to have to add on some modules that will do other things like marketing automation and email marketing. The challenge lies in the complexity of these systems of models. A company can start with one thing, but as they acquire other businesses, they bolt it all together in a kind of Frankenstein kind of thing.
The bottom line is, you don’t get a lot of salespeople who are satisfied with their CRM. Ultimately, that’s the Achilles Heel. If you can’t get your salespeople to use your CRM, then it’s not going to work for the business.
What we have tried to do is boil all of those different tools into one system to create an all-in-one automated CRM tool that’s driven by the sales price.
Standing out among the competition
To differentiate SalesNexus from the rest of the competition, we have fundamentally focused on the ease of use for the salesperson. One of the important elements of that is the ability to customize your CRM.
What you want is your salesperson to be on the phone with a customer, and everything they need is right there on one screen. It walks them through the important stuff you must fill out so that you can run reports and do the analysis as the manager, then hit next to go to the next person and do it again. We want them to be as productive as possible without wasting their time.
So with SalesNexus, that’s always been one of our fundamental strengths. We focus a lot of energy on allowing the customer to easily layout that screen the way just the way they want it.
Adapting to fit the needs of the customer
Our competitors have these certified consultants that will help you with things like training and setup if you need it. We are different in that we have never farmed that work out to others – we’ve always done it internally.
We do that because we know how important it is to help the customer get it right. Ultimately, if we help them get it right, they’re going to be a customer much longer. So, we build relationships with our customers that are much more intimate than most SaaS companies, frankly.
Moreover, we’re getting a lot of feedback as a result of that. We have garnered a lot of learning about what they really need to make it work for their business processes. Specifically, we learn what tools they require in the platform.
That’s what I love about what we do. I get to meet all these business owners and salespeople and just help them solve that problem.
And the result? We keep our customers.
Our churn rate keeps getting longer as we get older. The last time we measured it (6 months ago) we found our churn rate is 4 times less than the industry average. We win more customers who stay with us four times as long because we’re so connected with our audience and market.
Stepping in to support customers
I get involved as much as I can – I love doing it. And we have a team. As a new customer, they can sign up and set up the system themselves. The interface is easy for them to do the customization on their own. However, a lot of people want help. It’s hard to know how to do, especially if it’s your first time using a CRM for a new business.
So we can bring all of that experience and expertise to the table and help them answer those questions and then just go set it up for them. Then, in the end, we train their team. But by then, it’s not like a generic training course in our tool. It’s more we understand your business processes, here’s how to use this tool in your business. So it’s much more impactful for the salespeople when we go live.
We started doing a lot more email marketing help in that regard. A lot of our customers are very inexperienced with that and need a lot of guidance. Now we have a team that can help not only just design email templates but really work with the customers on the strategy too.
That’s tremendously helped us win more business in the last year or so because so many people lost contact with their customers. Not only do they get sent home to work, but now you can’t call your customer at work – they’re not in the office. So, email marketing has been a real saving grace for a lot of salespeople.
Top tips to win more business
Number one is just being very, very customer-focused and very engaged with the customers.
At the end of the day, salespeople are pretty simple animals. They’re motivated by the money of course, but most of the good ones are really motivated by the relationship with the customer. They want to spend their time engaging with the customer. That’s what we try to focus our attention on – automating that experience so that everything they need is right there.
Number two is to listen and adapt to your audience.
Initially, we were just a CRM. We didn’t have the marketing automation capabilities. And then we began to do our own digital marketing. We started to learn very quickly that you needed to have a really well-managed lead funnel in order to maximize the ROI on that advertising investment.
So that’s when we built our first email marketing capabilities, it was really for our own needs. That was a real game-changer for us because the timing was really good. At that time, everybody else was getting into ad words too, and struggling with the same thing. That’s when we realized that this all-in-one capability was so powerful for a sales team. We were able to solve that problem for customers that are investing in digital marketing, and that was a huge game-changer.
We recently released the ability to add that text messages. So that’s helped us win more business too. It’s mind-blowing how often people respond to text messages.
Finally, don’t discount the importance of your sales funnel.
We talk to new startups all the time, and they tend to be hyper-focused on only one part of the funnel.
I think it’s really important to take a step back and envision that entire funnel. You can view it as the customer’s entire journey through the relationship with your company. Then, you should ensure that you’ve got the tools and technology in place to manage that journey. Make sure that you’re engaging them and using content, and your sales team and everything else to bring them down through that funnel. With today’s tools, you can basically automate that entire process.
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SaaS Story In The Making is the podcast that features the people who made the software world, what it is today and the leaders who are shaping the future of technology.
Visit https://mattwolach.com/ to learn more about how host Matt Wolach helps software companies achieve maximum growth.
Check out this episode on Matt Wolach’s blog at https://tips.mattwolach.com/how-to-win-more-business-by-knowing-your-customers-with-craig-klein/