Salespeople have a lot to contend with these days. They have to find new leads, do sales pitches, attend meetings, and manage accounts to fulfill clients’ needs. Most importantly, they have to go through the whole process of converting leads to actual customers. And this can become a very long, trying process. Why? Because customers are more discriminating and demanding these days. It’s a buyer’s market, one would argue: buying has never been easier and they’re not exactly lacking in options.
So what should a salesperson and/or business owner do to accelerate productivity and sales?
Well, one: you have to set up systems and strategies that ensure salespeople are still productive in selling. And second: it’s important to take on very proactive measures in engaging and converting a prospect or potential customer. And one strategy you can implement to achieve this is hyper-personalization.
What is Hyper-Personalization?
Personalized emails and all kinds of personalized communications are the standard nowadays. Customizing messages and product recommendations—something you do in personalization—is good. But why not take it a step further? That’s hyper-personalization.
With hyper-personalization, you don't just send personalized emails. Or product and service recommendations based on customers’ purchase history. It doesn’t just rely on customer data.
Hyper-personalization combines customer, behavioral, and real-time data from different touch points. It also leverages on new technology, such as artificial intelligence and machine learning, to deliver more relevant content, communications, and service to clients and prospects. It supercharges the personalization process. It is definitely more complex but more effective and, ultimately, more rewarding.
For hyper-personalization, you need to fully understand your product or service and your customer. Understanding your customer will require collection of large quantities of data. Data will help gain customer insight for building your hyper-personalized strategies. These strategies aim to improve customer engagement and help prospects move further down the sales funnel. This is the core objective of hyper-personalization.
What kind of data do you need? Collect data on the usual demographics and psychographics. Then add other contextual data like purchase history, browsing history, buying patterns and behavior, points of interaction or engagement (with brand), touch points and channels used, and the like. These will be useful for your hyper-personalization strategy. The whole idea is to provide salespeople with tools (from data) to engage prospects in meaningful, productive conversations. This increases their chances of converting prospects into actual customers.
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Here’s an example to differentiate personalization from hyper-personalization:
A prospect has visited your website more than a couple of times. He’s filled up a form to download a lead magnet, and so you have his customer data: name, email, company name, industry, position, and company size. However, he has yet to really make a purchase or even initiate any form of contact or interaction other than the lead magnet download.
In personalization, you will send company newsletters to this prospect maybe once or twice a week. The subject line and/or salutation will bear the prospect’s first name. Then you will send some emails that are similar in topic to the lead magnet prospect downloaded.
In hyper-personalization, you will send personalized emails to the prospect. But this time, your topics will be more targeted. You will send an email similar in topic to the lead magnet he downloaded. You will also send emails that contain topics that are similar to all the pages the prospect visited on your site. Or the posts he read on your blog and the posts he liked on the company’s Facebook page.
You also noted that prospect usually visits your blog or website on Wednesday afternoons. This gives the impression that he has a more flexible schedule on that period of that day. So you automate the process and send your emails on Wednesday afternoons. When planning your sales cadence for lead nurturing, you will also schedule your first cold call on a Wednesday afternoon. And when you get the prospect in a sales call, you know exactly what to talk about. From his website page visits, you’ve seen the kinds of services he’s shown interest in. You more or less have an idea of what he needs, the kind(s) of problem he has, and the solution(s) he’s looking for. When you finally meet for an initial presentation, your sales pitch will be exactly what he is looking for.
Do you now see how hyper-personalization takes personalized service, marketing strategies, and lead nurturing to a whole new level?
The right technology, like a CRM with artificial intelligence and machine learning such as Lucrativ, will be one of your biggest allies in the successful implementation of your hyper-personalization strategies.
But how do you begin rolling out your hyper-personalization strategy? That’s in our next post.
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