Daniel Newman, founder and CEO of Broadsuite Consulting and author of “The Millennial CEO,” posted recently at CRM provider Base’s blog (blog.getbase.com) about key trends in customer engagement and how sales and marketing teams need to adapt.
Clients and prospects have exceedingly high expectations for responsiveness to service and sales requests. Thanks to a world where we are seemingly connected all of the time on mobile devices, people are now being driven by an almost unrealistic expectation of immediacy.
This sense of immediacy is creating a peer-to-peer (P2P) sales shift that is infiltrating more traditional B2B and B2C channels even off of social media. Moreover, the best customer experiences offline and online are driving professional expectations. While the need to be connected all of the time may seem unreasonable, businesses live in a customer-driven world where being available when they need you may be more important than the hours you post on your front door.
Trust tops the list when it comes to building successful, sustainable customer relationships and With word-of-mouth being the greatest business development opportunity according to 98 percent of businesses, it is a mere 3 percent that have true word-of-mouth business strategies in place leaving too much growth to chance. High levels of trust through building referral relationships with current clients and improved sentiment through brand influence are high on the list for sales growth.
