So far in this course, you have learned how to map customer journeys and document your CRM software needs. In this last part, we are going to bring these together and see how they can help you improve sales.
The customer journey charts the reality of user experience for your product or service. CRM software enables the marketing, sales, and customer services teams to carry out their daily work efficiently while keeping the rest of the organization informed about the latest customer data.
Together, they can increase visitor traffic to the brand’s points of contact and ultimately, boost your organization’s turnover and profit.
At the top of the sales funnel, you need to attract the greatest possible number of visitors while staying relevant. To attract substantial, qualified visitor numbers, the marketing content you create must be irresistible. This content is the product of a documented process.
Create Personas
Your first task here is to get to know your audience. At this stage, you already have your customer segments in mind.
To help you get to know each of them, it helps to develop one persona for each segment. That way, you’ll be able to improve the relevance of customer-centric content.
In our car rental agency example, we identified two key customer segments: business travelers and pleasure travelers.
To flesh out these two segments into personas, you’ll have two sources of information:
Within the organization, you can research customer profiles with the best profitability and those for whom the sales cycles have been the shortest. You can use the data in your CRM software for this research.
Outside the organization, you can carry out interviews with customers and prospects, as well as the teams who are in contact with them.
Conduct Customer Interviews to Flesh out Your Personas
The guiding theme for these prospect and customer interviews will be understanding what needs they want to meet and what frustrations they seek to resolve.
A good interviewer will be direct. You might ask:
What are you trying to achieve?
How are you currently doing this?
What frustrates you when you try to do this now?
When interviewing someone, don't settle for the first answer; always probe deeper until you are given a concrete example - and get to the customer's motivation.
Using these answers, you’ll put together your prospect and customer segments, taking care to create ones that are big enough to be economically viable. You must also organize your profiles so that they’re sufficiently different to justify creating separate content.
Let's Recap!
To develop customer-centric content, you need to convert your customer segments into personas.
You can use your CRM data and customer interviews to flesh out your personas.
Customer interviews require asking a lot of questions and probing for information.
In this chapter, you learned how a company can familiarize itself with its different groups of customers. Next, you will learn how to engage them with irresistible content.
