This is a guest post from Megan Webb-Morgan who writes about business communications and sales for a variety of business blogs across the web, including Resource Nation, B2B lead generation resource.

The attitude your sales team takes towards customer experience can have significant impacts on your sales, revenue, and long-term customer value. Customer experience encompasses every point of contact between customers and your company, including: purchases, customer service requests, call center communications and emerging communication channels like social media. To manage the customer experience, companies need to create a strategy that encompasses all customer touch points across the organization.

A sales team that places emphasis on creating a positive customer experience prioritizes the long-term value of a customer over short-term ROI. They tailor their interactions to complement the customer’s perspective on your communications, products, and service – providing the customer with a respectful, informative, and valuable experience.

When your sales team has a focus on the customer, the customer experience is:

Strategic

The experience your customers have with your company is an amalgamation of multiple different contact points that coalesces in each individual’s experience. Your sales team should take the view that customer experience isn’t a varied collection of unrelated interactions. These interactions form lasting impressions and perceptions that can either inspire growing trust or disillusion the customer with your company brand.

Customers may interact with your business numerous times, and speak with several different sales associates before making a purchase. Are those interactions consistent? Do they bring value to the customer before any sale is made?

Creating a strategy for managing the multiple customer contact points is important for providing customers with a consistent, positive experience. Your sales team, product team, and customer service team are all integral elements in that strategy.

Well-defined

Product, sales, and customer service all have a tendency to silo their knowledge, keeping it solely within the department for use. For example, data generated from your call center software will become a valuable tool for the sales team.

A well-defined plan for creating the right customer experience combines product, sales, and service data in order to generate a full picture of what the customer expects and desires from your company. That picture should be the basis for creating a well-defined plan to make the preferred customer experience a reality.

Intentional

When your sales team is united in their attitude towards creating a consistent customer experience, their relations with customers shift. Each individual interaction is specific to the particular situation at hand; however, the sales team approaches the interaction with the goal of orchestrating a positive customer experience, augmented by the pre-defined customer experience strategy.

Reciprocal

In order for your strategy to be successful, it cannot simply lay out a one-sided plan of action – it needs to account for customer feedback. Interactions between the sales team and the customer are most successful when they are reciprocal. The customer listens to the salesperson’s pitch, and the salesperson in turn listens to the customer’s responses and makes changes to their approach based on the individual customer’s specific needs.

A high-quality employee-customer dynamic is important to creating the experience that customers want – one that is informative, respectful, and valuable for any customer in any situation. When your sales team places value on the overall customer experience, then your customers’ satisfaction, loyalty, and long-term value increases exponentially.

Bio: Megan Webb-Morgan writes about business communications and sales for a variety of business blogs across the web, including Resource Nation, B2B lead generation resource.

Photo Credit: Victor1558 via Compfight cc