Buyers today are more empowered than ever. Sellers find themselves grappling with how to handle these informed buyers in a landscape that’s rapidly changing, thanks to social media, mobile technology, and other forms of digital media. Tying together a prospect’s activity across emerging and established channels requires technology and processes that most sales and marketing teams don’t yet have in place. 

“The big thing that jumps out at me is that customers are already halfway through their evaluation process the first time a salesperson has a meeting with them,” says Jason Angelos, a managing director in Accenture’s Sales and Customer Service practice. Today’s buyers do their own research first, instead of starting with a salesperson. The purchase process is already 57 percent complete by the time a buyer contacts a seller, according to a study done last year by the CEB Marketing Leadership Council.

For some salespeople, more educated buyers could mean a quicker close. But it can also mean that some companies are ruled out before salespeople even have an opportunity to educate prospects about their product. As a result, reaching and educating potential buyers requires a more coordinated effort. “Most of what we see is companies that are kind of one foot in and one foot out, still executing the old sales playbook,” Angelos says. To succeed in today’s environment, sellers and marketers must take an omnichannel approach, connecting interactions with their customers across channels even before they reach out to the company. Email, mobile, phone, social media, digital advertising, and old-fashioned face-to-face interactions must work in concert.

Lesson 1: Know Their Preferred Channel

In today’s digitally connected environment, sales teams must “meet the customer where the customer wants to be met,” Angelos advises. We all have our preferred channels, depending on what information we’re after. Maybe we prefer email newsletters to keep us posted on a company’s news and social media to learn about its reputation. Or maybe we really only trust what we’re told face to face. 

“If you’ve already conceded to [prospects’] preference in communication, you start the relationship on a positive note,” states Robert Killory, chief customer officer for 3CLogic, a cloud contact center software company. “The more comfortable they are with the communication, the more likely your success.” If a customer starts talking to you over the phone, Killory advises using that channel for further communications unless he indicates otherwise. 

The challenge is when a company requires a multichannel approach. A Web site can help a potential customer assess if a product is a fit, but it’s rare for a highly considered purchase to start and end in that channel. Closing a sale often means moving that customer to another channel, be it an email introduction, a phone call, or a face-to-face meeting. Understanding what channel customers prefer, and when they prefer it, will help sellers master omnichannel communication.

Angelos offers an example from the insurance industry, where two-thirds of consumers prefer to purchase their insurance through an agent. But the lead-up process includes interacting with the prospect across multiple channels. A pop-up chat window on an insurer’s Web site enables agents to follow up with a customer who asked for a quote but hasn’t yet purchased. People can be nudged to purchase in other channels, with the eventual goal being a call to an agent or an online purchase. Coordinating and timing the messages across channels takes finesse and understanding of the customer’s thought process. 

Consistency is also important. Companies that have both online buying portals and in-person sales must make sure that pricing, inventory, and the overall experience are the same across channels. “The reality is that you could be bouncing between different experiences,” notes Brigid Fyr, Accenture’s global -e-commerce lead. “Once [customers] get to your site to conduct a transaction, does that feel like the same experience?” 

The tenet of using a person’s preferred method of communication also holds true for employees. Killory encourages companies selling in a call center to assess the key strengths of their sales force and customize their work flows accordingly, something 3CLogic has on its road map for next year with its intelligent prioritization feature. An agent who can handle five chats at once can receive five chats, while another may be given a rule allowing for one phone conversation at a time, as well as two emails in his queue to answer during breaks. Allowing salespeople to focus on the channels they have the most success in drives efficient sales. 

For field salespeople, that channel is often mobile. Tablets or smartphones accessed before, during, and after a call can be transformative for salespeople, allowing them to reach their customers in more personal ways and make their jobs easier in the process. Companies that support sales mobility see 23 percent more of their team meet their quotas, according to a 2013 study by the Aberdeen Group. Having access to data from other channels can often be the difference between a closed deal and a lost one. 

Lesson 2: Track the Customer Journey 

In the early days of CRM, tracking customers meant manually entering information about them into a CRM system, which often involved salespeople “writing a story” that left out important details, says Giles House, chief marketing officer of Callidus Software. Today, CRM systems pull information from multiple sources to provide a complete view of the customer, showing everything from digital channels that can more easily be tracked to -LinkedIn profiles, external data from Dun & Bradstreet, and customers’ interactions with marketing and service departments. The latter is why now, more than ever, salespeople must interact with colleagues in other departments. 

Before even speaking to a salesperson, many prospects will visit a company’s Web site, sign up for a Webinar, or download a whitepaper, thus removing their anonymity and entering a marketing automation system. According to Laura Ramos, a vice president and principal analyst at Forrester Research, studies generally find it takes eight to 12 impressions or touches to reach the stage when the salesperson will make a call or put an opportunity into the pipeline. “Eight to twelve is a lot,” Ramos notes. “They tend to happen over a number of channels, and traditionally those have been physical: advertising, trade shows, sponsorships, Web site, email. More recently, in the past five years, is the explosion in all the social channels.” As marketing and advertising technology converge, it’s easier to market to these anonymous customers, appearing on their Facebook feed or as they browse the Web.

Bizo and Demandbase both provide business-to-business (B2B) digital advertising to clients, helping drive business decision-makers to their Web sites and customizing content according to the buyer. 

Demandbase’s product can also observe prospects’ Web activity, providing more transparency into the sales process. For example, based on where a prospect is in the sales pipeline, a salesperson might believe there’s an 80 percent likelihood that a deal will close. However, if the prospect hasn’t visited the company’s Web site in 60 days, it’s unlikely the deal will actually close, Demandbase Chief Executive Officer Chris Golec says. Conversely, if there’s a high amount of Web traffic from a company that the sales team hasn’t even contacted yet, that can be a cue for someone to reach out and start a conversation.

Web analytics is only the beginning. Salespeople can also glean insights from their interactions with clients over email or through Web-based customer portals, which can contain everything from slide show decks to videos to contracts. For B2B deals where there are multiple decision-makers, these customer portals can easily be shared as others within the organization are brought into the buying process. They can also help salespeople time their communication. “Sometimes a customer goes dark for a few weeks, and you can’t get them on the phone or via email. You can wait for that movement or view in the portal, and then go and track them down,” House offers as an example.

The same tracking works for email. Add-ons such as Yesware or HubSpot Signals show when prospects have opened emails. Once a salesperson sees a person has viewed an email, for example, he might initiate a conversation in another channel, giving the prospect a call to follow up. Observing customers’ movements across channels and using that information to time their experience or personalize the content is the new frontier. B2B salespeople and marketers who harness that information and use it in an organized, process-oriented way will reap the rewards.

Lesson 3: Jump Into the Social Conversation

Social media is a large ecosystem with plenty of niches where businesspeople gather to discuss products, ideas, and companies. Professional social networks such as LinkedIn can provide valuable data about a prospect, and its industry groups can serve as fishing holes for enterprising salespeople.

Social listening tools such as Salesforce.com">Salesforce.com’s Radian6 and HootSuite enable companies to monitor what people are saying about their brand and understand what topics are generating the most conversation. But translating social media into sales can be trickier. Companies using social media as a place to have a one-to-one conversation with their customers must listen and respond. The trick is knowing when to use each approach.

GetSatisfaction helps companies create user communities where people can talk about their products. The conversation threads can center on problem-solving, comparing one company to another, and more. That makes community boards a valuable place for salespeople and marketing teams to monitor. “Because B2B sales cycles are longer, buyers want to do their own research and only talk to a salesperson when they’re ready to buy. But that decision to talk to sales is still a big hurdle. A community gives the buyer an opportunity to raise [her] hand and express interest in a way that’s less intimidating,” says Scott Hirsch, who recently left GetSatisfaction, where he was vice president of product marketing. One of its customers, wireless solutions provider Aerohive, has topic sections devoted to educating prospective buyers and differentiating its product from the competition. “Some of the most viewed conversations in their community feature actual customers discussing the relative benefit of their products over key competitors. This is community engagement that actually drives sales,” Hirsch emphasizes. “It’s also a way to engage buyers earlier in the sales cycle. Giving them exposure to other customers’ posts is also some of the best content marketing you can do.”

Big data analytics platform HP Vertica also uses GetSatisfaction, and tried to expand its focus to include not just knowledge but “conversation around the hot topic of big data. This is content marketing in its purest form,” Hirsch states. “As a result of hosting these conversations, the brand reaps the rewards of great content that influences buyers and indexes very well in search engines. The company and the customers win.”

The most sophisticated companies connect what their customers are doing in the user community channel to other places where they might be able to reach them. “It’s a great way for the sales rep to play a consultative role,” Hirsch says. “Sales teams can monitor community conversations and make themselves passively available to lightly reach out, and say, ‘Hey, are you interested in talking about your issue one-on-one?’” GetSatisfaction also integrates with Salesforce.com, allowing salespeople to use information gleaned from community boards to inform their sales process. During a renewal, for example, a sales rep can look at how a buyer has engaged and offer upsells or cross-sells. By having ownership over the community channel, companies can guide the direction of the community while still having the authenticity that comes from a community, not a voice from above.

Lesson 4: Report on the Omnichannel Customer, Not the Channel

When it comes to reporting about the relationship with a customer, most companies still report by channel. “People always think of calling history, email history, chat history. It’s not. It’s communications history,” Killory says. “Put it into silos only if you want to measure the effectiveness of one channel.” 

Companies not only need to look at sales and marketing effectiveness holistically, but they also need to see their customer’s journey as a whole. “The ability to recognize the buyer across channels is hard to do,” Ramos says. “It’s judged by the buyer’s experience, not yours. If [the buyer feels], ‘This company knows me,’ it means the company recognizes where I am in the process of being a customer, the company is engaging with me afterwards, knows my issues, and it’s working to make my life better. The other thing that’s implied is that the experience is consistent and seamless.”

In B2B marketing and selling, though, that’s complicated by the fact that there are often multiple buyers. “An automobile and a virtualization cloud solution are both highly considered, high-end products. But there are multiple decision-makers when you’re buying a virtualization cloud solution,” Ramos says. “This is where omnichannel becomes interesting. If there are multiple people involved, you need to know what their roles are and how they change over the course of the buying process. There’s a complicated set of touches and interactions there,” Ramos offers. “B2B is more complicated than the B2C [business-to-consumer] side of the house.” 

Currently, B2C businesses tend to be more sophisticated in how they market and sell across channels. That’s made B2B businesses realize the gaps in their own business, and technology has followed to help connect to prospects better. “When you first think of omnichannel, folks over-index on the consumer lens and the role of digital, and that makes a ton of sense,” Angelos observes. “There’s so much to learn from these channels, across the selling models.” B2C and B2B businesses alike share the same challenge. Getting closer to the customer and understanding what he or she wants isn’t just a best practice, it’s key to survival.

“If you’re not focusing on the ultimate user, you’re going to be disintermediated by someone else,” Ramos spells out. “Knowing the customers better, serving them better, and engaging them better is going to be what creates competitive advantage in the next twenty years. The competitive advantage will come from customer relationships.” 

Associate Editor Sarah Sluis can be reached at ssluis@infotoday.com.