In a recent Forrester study, a dichotomy was drawn between organizations that invest in customer experience and those that do not. Forrester’s data determined that over a five year period, the organizations that adopted CX-driven practices saw a 17 percent spike in revenue year-over-year. Meanwhile, organizations that were slow to adapt grew at only 3 percent.
Of course, when it comes to increasing revenue, shoring up internal inefficiencies can be equally as valuable to your bottom line as any customer-facing action. As such, it would be short-sighted to look solely into projects that augment CX.
Adopting user experience best practices, on the other hand, will give you the opportunity to focus on projects that can help both your personnel and your customers. This is particularly true for sales teams, which are under a set of unique challenges in an increasingly complex digital marketplace driven by highly-informed consumers.
So how can making improvements to UX help your sales force sell? Let’s take a closer look at some of the top challenges being faced by today’s sales teams. If any of these look familiar to you, it’s a clear indication that taking the time to invest in UX may give your sales team the support they need to keep landing sales.
Your top seller is starting to resemble an administrator.
Ask any salesperson and they’ll tell you that there’s no secret to being successful—sales is very much a numbers game. If you make more calls, you’ll increase your sales. With each sale comes administrative processes that are unavoidable. A poorly designed interface could be hindering your sales team’s ability to handle their back-end responsibilities and get back to selling quickly.
Your sales teams have been asked to become social media influencers.
The days of social media platforms being simple ways to stay connected with friends are long over. Instead, socials have become a unique blend of marketing and sales opportunities. But in the same way that you don’t want sales to come secondary to administrative functions, you also don’t want your sales force to be tasked with becoming social media influencers. Deploying chatbots rooted in sound UX principles will help streamline the process of moving customers from social media along the proper path to conversion.
Sales and service inquiries are being directed to the wrong departments.
Resolving a customer service issue is a great way to ingratiate consumers to your brand. But that doesn’t mean your sales force should be tied up responding to service issues constantly. If your sales force is spending exorbitant time responding to service inquiries, it may be a reflection that your page navigation needs to be smoothed out.
You’re not generating high-quality leads.
One of the easiest ways to convert more customers is to spend more time focused on qualified leads. Making UX improvements can help you do this in two ways. Conducting user research at the onset can help you craft a more honed buyer persona, allowing your sales force to know ahead of time who they’re selling to, and how to connect with them better.
Simultaneously, you may also be losing opportunities to connect with qualified leads due to poor placement or timing when it comes to registration and fill forms. Taking the time to improve the user’s experience when giving out personal information should be tantamount, and should help your sales force.
Shopping carts are being abandoned.
Trillions of dollars are left in abandoned shopping carts every year, according to a recent PYMNTS.com report. When asked why they abandoned items during checkout, bad UX played a role in a number of responses:
- A long and complicated checkout process
- Couldn’t see or calculate total order cost
- The site wanted me to create an account
- Website had errors
- Didn’t trust the site with their credit card
Your sales team works hard to acquire every customer. But by ignoring glaring UX issues, you make their job that much harder.
If any of these issues sound familiar, it may be time for you to do your sales team a favor and make UX a priority within your organization. Learn more about how you can get started and what your business can accomplish with your next UX project.
