Building better sales relationships is about more than remembering birthdays, sending monthly newsletters, or giving crazy discounts. When sales reps think about using customer data to enrich sales relationships, their mind goes to CRMs, but there’s another way data can build relationships: through starting conversations.
In this article, we’ll take a look at three sales metrics based on existing customer data which your sales reps can use to deepen their sales relationships without revealing sensitive company information.
Using customer data to build better relationships: understanding their context
The bigger picture of overall yearly spend: revenue $ swing
Reps are struggling to pin down why a customer’s year on year growth changes at random - or doesn’t grow at all. Until they know why, your team won't be able to maximize their customers’ full potential.
Revenue $ swing, is a sales metric which deepens a sales relationship by prompting conversation on the customer’s bigger picture.
Revenue $ Swing = Take a customer's overall revenue generated for the previous year, and match it by month with the revenue for the current year to find the year on year difference.
During a customer meeting, on-site or virtually, a rep can show the customer their revenue $ swing to start a discussion on the bigger influences which drive the customer’s buying patterns. Example question: Is there a reason why spending for March-June is declining more each year, but increasing in September-December? Has restructuring affected your budgets?
The rep can then note these findings against the customer to help them build a more personalized sales strategy to provide the customer with more relevant deals throughout the year.
Zoom in closer to yearly purchase history: quantity swing
Lately, your team hasn’t had luck landing their pitches. Although they have a purchase history for each customer, they’re still missing the mark, and if they continue pitching the wrong product, they’ll begin degrading sales relationships.
Starting conversation using the quantity swing sales metric is a great way for a rep to plug their knowledge.
Quantity Swing = Arrange a customer's purchases over the previous year into a 12 month history, and match it month-by-month to the purchases for the current year, to identify growth or decline.
Proactive reps will already use customer data to spot sales gaps, however, without context, reps will struggle to identify if lower orders compared to last year signal sales opportunities or market issues. Example questions: What’s going on with your consumers and how is this impacting your orders? Are you experiencing increased demand? Have you started a new project?
Asking for and capturing additional context enhances sales relationships by proving to customers their sales reps care about their challenges and needs. Reps can use these new insights to pitch more relevant products at better times in the right quantities.
Down to the product level: average unit price swing
Despite having access to customer data and unit pricing, your team feels it’s not just higher prices which are lowering their customers’ order sizes. Without additional context, the team won’t know if they’re losing just a few sales to a competitor, or losing a customer entirely.
To get more detail on what influences their customers, reps can discuss the highly specific sales metric average unit price swing.
Average Unit Price Swing: Gather last year's prices for the SKUs a customer purchased, then compare this list with the current year's prices for those SKUs to spot fluctuations.
The rep can show their customer where savings are being made, while the customer explains the effect particular price changes have had on them, or outside factors influencing their purchase behavior. Example questions: Have you been buying elsewhere? What else has affected your purchases of these SKUs?
Using customer data to identify opportunities and ask questions can help grow sales relationships if the core intention is to arrive at a personalized, mutually beneficial agreement.
If sales reps have the right customer data, they can start having conversations at any level, gaining the context they need to treat their customers better. However, reps won't have time to sift through their BI tool to gather these sales metrics themselves. With a sales performance app, reps can use Customer View to automatically sanitize customer data for sharing in the moment without revealing sensitive information. Watch this feature in action by booking a demo with us here.
