Did you know you can improve sales, drive customer retention, and build brand loyalty through effective customer engagement?
Customer or client engagement is the emotional connection between your customers and your buying process. The better a customer interacts with your products and sales reps, the more invested they become to buy.
If your sales team doesn’t get customers emotionally involved with your product through a sales process, product knowledge, and testimonials, you may very well bid goodbye to them. The trick to avoiding this situation is ensuring customers love your product when they purchase it.
Customer engagement involves cultivating a strong relationship between your brand and the customer that goes beyond one-off transactions. It’s a conscious and consistent effort from your sales reps to provide value at every point of customer interaction aimed at building a strong base of loyal customers.
Customer engagement makes your brand omnipotent by ensuring your team is always present (and ready) when your customer needs help.
The only problem? Being omnipotent is no easy task.
You need a solid strategy to do this right — one that encompasses the entire customer journey and every other customer-facing team (sales, operations, customer service).
Considering the role sales meetings and webinars play in accelerating revenue by establishing your company as a figure of authority, here are a few tips to help you engage your clients during these events:
You’ll have customers in different stages of the sales funnel. Since we’re talking webinars and sales meetings, you’ll need content focusing on the top funnel and middle funnel stages.
Here’s how you can go about this — brainstorm suitable topics for different stages of customers, including brand-new audiences and those further down in the sales process.
Next comes topic research.
Ask your sales and customer support teams for the most common questions they get from prospects in each stage of the sales process. You can also collect customer feedback to better understand customer expectations. Then incorporate these pointers in your webinar content, PowerPoints, and other materials, filling all knowledge gaps at each level of the sales and marketing funnel to deliver personalized experiences.
Suppose you’re planning a webinar for your brand-new software company. Your viewer will obviously have little to no knowledge about your product, which is why you’ll need top-funnel lead content that tells the attendees what your product does and why it matters.
Assuming you secure a sales meeting with one of the webinar attendees, your next focus should be to create a middle-funnel lead content that takes a more specific approach (think: how they can use your product to solve specific pain points).
Remember the old proverb: “You catch more flies with honey than vinegar?“
It means you'll convert more prospects into paying customers and increase profitability with polite requests and a positive attitude rather than forceful demands and an overbearing attitude.
That's why empathy is such a game-changer for any business.
When you focus your conversations around your clients, you'll better understand their needs and challenges. You can ask them questions and get candid answers to know what they need to use your product better.
The idea here is to put yourself in your customer’s shoes and empathize with them. Listen to them intently. Relate to their frustrations. Assure them you understand and will escalate their problem to the appropriate person.
The end result? Greater customer satisfaction.
Would you ever return to a brand that left you unsatisfied or frustrated?
Exactly.
Even the numbers agree. A study found that 84% of companies who worked on improving their customer experience saw an increase in revenue.
Potential customers want their money or time’s worth, so delivering anything short of a great experience during a sales meeting or a webinar is going to have consequences — whether it’s having attendees wait too long during a webinar or not answering a potential client’s burning questions during a meeting.
How can you create great customer experiences? Start by mapping out all the ways you interact with customers. This includes emails, social media, and in-person meetings. Thoroughly analyze each channel to identify service gaps and take the required measures to improve.
You can also leverage Hoppier to up the stakes.
Use Hoppier’s Visa cards to reduce no-shows by allowing prospects to order from millions of local and global vendors. Whether you want to offer free lunch, bulk gift cards, or small gifts to show appreciation, you can do it all with Hoppier.
Webinars and sales meetings are excellent ways to engage with your target customers. But if you adopt a value-oriented approach, you’ll also see conversions rise.
Customers want to know more details and discover insights about your products before making purchase decisions. So, don’t list product properties. Instead, create a real connection with attendees that will influence them and make them eager to buy your product.
The following are a few pointers to keep in mind:
We have all attended sales meetings and webinars where the speaker simply recites the details of their product. They don't take the initiative to involve you, successfully making it a dull and boring affair.
That’s where storytelling comes into the picture.
Storytelling involves narrating the incidents of success and failure, helping attendees relate to them and want to listen more. It's a great tactic to keep your audience interested in attending the webinar or the meeting.
When your events are oriented to a story, your customers will be more interested in your product — and you’ll make more sales. What’s more, storytelling also lets you inform your audience about your product’s benefits and how they can take advantage of them in the real world.
You need solid ground when telling your story to make all this happen, though.
Here’s an excellent template example from ZoomInfo to use storytelling in a sales meeting or a webinar:
Beginning: The Main character is Jack, VP of Sales.
“Jack, I see your org recently upgraded your CRM. How is that going for you and your sales team?”
Middle: The challenge the character faces.
“One of the challenges of managing a CRM is keeping it flush with accurate customer data. Maybe you’ve experienced this: Your sales reps waste a ton of time researching dead-end contacts when they could be closing deals.”
Conclusion: How the character overcomes the challenge
“You’ve invested in a great CRM. But it’s only as good as the data going into it. In fact, we recently helped a VP of Sales in a similar industry 10 X their productivity.
Their sales team is selling like crazy. They’re pretty happy. I know we can do the same for you.”
During a webinar or a sales meeting, offer additional bonuses to keep your audience hooked. This will help motivate your audience in buying your products right away.
These bonuses can be in different shapes. Here are some of the most commonly used ones:
When you give your prospects a little extra, they’ll be more likely to buy your products. Be sure to keep describing your bonus material during your presentation to arouse their interest and maximize benefit.
Author and customer experience expert Dan Gingiss told Salesforce:
“Companies must realize that they are no longer competing against the guy down the street or the brand that sells similar products. Instead, they’re competing with every other experience a customer has.”
The problem here is that managing customer communication and interactions to deliver awesome experiences is slightly complicated, especially when you're handling multiple clients — that too manually. Luckily, customer engagement software makes this whole shebang (a lot) easier.
Let’s look at some of the best tools in the market that are worth your time and money.
Pendo offers two solution-focused features: product experience and digital adoption.
Use the software’s comprehensive product analytics capabilities to get data-driven results and help users make sound decisions. You can also show your offering’s main features customized to their individual use case.
User segmentation is particularly easy with Pendo, too.
Factor in relevant customer engagement metrics to deliver useful insights about your target audience’s behavior and attitudes. There’s also an in-app self-service that your customers can use to navigate some of the more complex areas of your product for greater clarity.
Braze is another successful customer engagement platform that lets you build dynamic audiences in minutes and create personalized customer journeys to support customer relationships.
At its core, Braze amplifies interactions between your target audience and your brand.
It enables you to listen to customers across multiple digital touchpoints and gain context around their preferences and behaviors. Leveraging data to classify audiences, personalizing messages, and testing campaigns — all in real-time — is also possible.
More importantly, you can send each customer the right message, on the right channel, at the right time. This helps create powerful partnerships, eventually increasing customer loyalty and building an engaged customer base.
SalesLoft makes sales prospecting simple and seamless.
It provides deep insights and upfront intelligence to facilitate meetings, plus lets you set custom roles for everyone from managers to executives to sales reps. Third-party integrations with popular platforms like Gmail, Salesforce, ZoomInfo, and LinkedIn Sales Navigator come in handy to personalize outreach, track performance and deliver resources.
Coach-to-close workflow is SalesLoft‘s more unique feature that helps you to identify at-risk deals, call trends, and successful plays to achieve goals. Cadence, account, individual, and conversation analytics further help improve sales.
Easy to see why G2 named SalesLoft as its top sales engagement platform on its best software list.
Outreach comes packed with awesome prospecting, outreach, and account-based marketing features to help you engage more clients easily.
Build your prospect list by using the platform to source and verify contact details. You can also identify decision-makers at your prospective company to better plan your outreach and identify the best point of contact.
Follow it up by automating outrage or sending sales please directly into the Outreach CRM to track your sales pipeline. A built-in email campaign creator makes it easier than ever to create time-saving email templates. Sending automatic follow-ups in case someone doesn’t reply is also possible.
The fact that Outreach has so many features makes the learning curve a bit steep. But companies with large sales departments will find the elaborate offerings a boon to improve efforts and save time.
Hoppier is an unconventional tool you can use to bolster your sales and marketing campaigns.
You can create Hoppier digital cards for your prospects to entice them into booking a sales meeting or attending your webinar in exchange for incentives they love.
How?
These cards will allow attendees to order from (literally) millions of local and global platforms in over 60+ countries. You can send a coffee from Starbucks, create a remote lunch program, organize happy hour drinks through Drizzly, or send personalized Amazon gifts and allowances.
Building loyalty programs for existing customers is also possible with Hoppier, which might we add is helpful for word-of-mouth marketing strategies. You can use it to smoothen the customer lifecycle and ensure customer success.
Not only will this reduce no-shows, but also prove to prospects that you value their attendance. The whole thing is very convenient, too. Whatever your prospect orders will be delivered right to their doorstep, regardless of where they live.
The above strategies and tools will help you bring in new customers and get your current customers more engaged with your brand — provided you use them right.
Also, whatever customer engagement strategy you apply, be consistent. Make your messaging on-brand and relevant to your target audience’s use case, and do your best to deliver positive end-to-end customer experiences throughout their journey.
Opt for Hoppier to take your first step in this journey. Click here to experience the platform's convenience yourself.
Ready to 2x your global engagement at your next event, with Ox stress?
Make Hoppier your unfair advantage today, schedule a demo
Ready to 2x your global engagement at your next event, with Ox stress?
Make Hoppier your unfair advantage today, schedule a demo
Ready to 2x your global engagement at your next event, with Ox stress?
Make Hoppier your unfair advantage today, schedule a demo
Ready to 2x your global engagement at your next event, with Ox stress?
Make Hoppier your unfair advantage today, schedule a demo
Our team will support you, to make your programs a success
Amazing customer service
Average 4 minute response times
International coverage
