Over the last years, you have probably spent quite some time on digitizing your business. You have been working on marketing automation, customer journeys, CRM systems, playbooks, …
But in the end, it is each individual sales rep, who will assist and advise your customers in ordering your products and services – no matter whether he is good at it or not. Controlling those (online) meetings is tough. Which information is shared? What questions are asked? What are the desired goals and next steps? Is my sales rep experienced enough to close deals?
To make this more convenient for you and your team, we suggest you to make use of “predefined customer meeting journeys” in combination with an online meeting. Both, your sales rep and your customer are guided automatically through a results-oriented online meeting, step by step.
Customer meeting journeys are very specific about all the possible steps and options. And could contain many varied steps. The best way is to visualize it. This is what we call a journey map.
Journey map
A customer meeting journey map is a visual representation of your optimum meeting process, which leads to the predefined meeting goal. This journey map gives you a great insight of what should be discussed in the meeting, what information is gathered and shared, and what the ideal outcome will be.
A customer meeting journey is not a linear line from A to B. Customer requirements differ, meetings need a certain amount of flexibility. And the desired outcome can differ, based on the customers’ situation.
Taking the time to draw your journey map is valuable and well spent time.
The advantages of a journey map:
- You break down the meeting in several phases, like the opening, investigation of the customers’ requirements, demonstration of your capabilities and obtaining commitments. For all those phases you will think thoroughly about the goals you want to achieve, questions you need to ask, information you want to share and commitment you need before you go to the next phase.
- The thinking of your team will be more campaign and target group minded. What does the map for new potential customers look like, and what for existing customers? How does our map differ for customers in different industries?
- Your sales meetings will evolve to higher levels. You will gain experience and feedback on the meeting journeys. This provides useful insights, and will help improve the customer meetings, since customer communication optimization is a continuous process.
- A more customer and results-based mentality is created throughout the company. Customer meeting journeys can be enriched with often forgotten questions like: Do you know any other company we should approach with our services? Are there other projects in your organization where we could be of any help? Those questions are a great source of new opportunities.
- You are closing the gap between marketing and sales. Creating journeys together strengthen the outcome.
The best way to create a journey map
- For each journey, define your ideal customer
- Set your goals for this journey
- List all phases of this journey
- Identify a goal for each phase and the required customer information, shared information and needed commitment
- Identify the elements you want to use in this journey
- Create the journey. There are multiple options, varying from drawing it on a white board, or using work-flow drawing tools
- Test it internally with as much stakeholders as possible, like your sales-team, management , support, marketing…
- Start using it and gather feedback to optimize the journey. See this as a constant work in progress.
Idiligo has built many customer meeting journeys together with its customers and implemented this successfully. If you like to learn more about this, feel free to contact us or one of our certified Idiligo Partners.
Or join our free online workshop on November 20 at 4pm CET.