The impact of 2020 and the COVID-19 pandemic has had a huge impact on customer behavior with comprehensive changes to how they want to do business.
Prospective B2B customers have for example changed what were the traditional ways to conduct business such as in-person meetings and moved online and are working via digital channels.
What many businesses are seeing is a shift in how they interact with their customer base as they are spending far more time online, not just for meetings but also working remotely.
Businesses need to recognize and react to this change in behavior and adjust how they do business along with employing new digital working practices. They must find new ways to optimize their customer interactions and be able to present the added value that their products and services bring without face-to-face contact.
To be able to thrive in this new digital economy, businesses must improve their own digital habits and excel at providing an enhanced digital customer experience. Without the benefit of in-person meetings, exhibitions, and conferences to target sales contacts.
Commercially it makes sense to invest in your capabilities to retain existing customers when acquiring a new customer can be 5 to 25x more expensive than retaining an existing one.
Increased expectations for online interaction no matter what business you are in.
One business sector that has grown exponentially has been the rapid rise of “digital native” companies, such as Birchbox or Slack, businesses that have “raised the bar” of customer expectations because of their streamlined digital user experience.
Ecommerce vendors such as Amazon have witnessed explosive online growth, fuelling along with the likes of Slack a digital economy which normalizes digital interactions with customers.
As a result, B2B buyers now also expect from their vendors the same level of online interaction just as they do when they make personal purchases.
Salesforce research found that 47% of customers say they’ll stop buying from a company if they have a negative customer experience. The same study reveals that 76% of customers now say it’s easier than ever to take their business elsewhere.
Today, it’s difficult for the B2B sector to get the attention of their target audience with so much noise in the market.
According to Gartner, buyers are 57% of the way through their buying process before they even reach out to a vendor. Additionally, by 2025, Accenture predicts 50% of all transactions in manufacturing will take place over the internet.
But there is also a lack of know-how for businesses on how to leverage the digital economy. All of which translates into weaker revenue streams and a higher cost of sales and customer acquisition.
Happy customers mean a lower cost of acquisition as Bain & Company research found that by increasing your customer retention rate by just 5% can increase profits by 25 to 95%.
Many companies have over the years found different ways to target and reach buyers, but often still fail to nurture a contact to close a sale. This has been a common occurrence in those business sectors where complex products have been traditionally sold in a mostly in-person, direct sales environment.
So, with the difficulty in getting an in-person meeting and with B2B buyers taking more time than ever to deliberate, it’s even more important now to be able to undertake “value selling” remotely.
The goal of value selling is to show that the value of the transaction more than justifies the price. Seen through the returns of using the product or service.
B2B sales has evolved.
In this dynamic new environment the Sales teams needs to work out how to communicate their product’s true customer value in a digital economy. To reinvent how they sell, to reinforce the value to buyers by creating a buying experience that focuses on the total value they bring rather than purely on the price.
Value selling in today’s marketplace.
Customers today have far more access via the internet to information relevant to how they make buying decisions; they are more resourceful and more in control of their buying journey than ever before.
The first place they are going to look and do their research is online, so if you don’t have a way to showcase your added value digitally, you will fall behind more digitally savvy competitors.
While reducing prices is a common knee jerk reaction to fill the sales pipeline, it can be a short-term boost and sell a few more products. Long-term, price reductions are difficult to move upwards if market conditions improve as you’ll meet resistance and customer churn.
What has become clear since the COVID-19 pandemic is that many industries, particularly those with long and complex sales cycles are not equipped to respond to the demands of a new digital economy.
For those involved in a complex B2B buying process, buyers often don’t want to have meetings in the initial stages of the buying journey, they want to see how the product would perform.
ValueVisualizer® is our answer, an interactive web-app that visualizes investment value for products and services. Alpaxa creates customized digital solutions to visualize product values that are difficult to calculate, enabling your sales team to qualify product values more effectively and undertake value selling in the digital economy.
The ValueVisualizer® is the next generation of digital sales tools.
Transforming to a value selling sales strategy focuses on the value you bring, rather than the price you charge. As a salesperson talking about ROI the ValueVizualizer helps the sales focus on building relationships rather than undertaking complex calculations.
By visualizing complex industrial processes, financial value calculations and operational efficiencies, the ValueVizualizer can display the output on an app integrated into your digital sales process.
As a decision tool ROI is simple to understand and apply. And by presenting the ROI on a digital platform it allows buyers to build their own scenarios to test assumptions, interact with your team remotely and use as a presentation tool face-to-face.
If you want to hear more about ValueVisualizer™ or to hear how we can help you re-invent how to work remotely with complex value calculations, don’t hesitate to book a Free Consultation: sales@alpaxa.com