How to Test your Buyer's Experience: Closing

In B2B sales, it’s easy to get impersonal. The very name, business-to-business, replaces individuals with larger entities. But as with any sales process, B2B deals rely on small-scale personal interactions: individual sales representatives? speaking with individual buyers. In the increasingly digital realm of B2B sales, customer experience testing is as important as ever.?

To deliver the best experience to your customers—and, as a result, close more deals—you need to regularly evaluate and improve the buyer’s journey. It can be a slow, painstaking process, but it’s worth it. And in this blog series, we break it down for you.?

Our first newsletter in this series covers the first stages of the buyer’s journey, from prospecting up until the lead has been passed to an account executive. This newsletter —part two—covers the next stage: closing.?

Once an Account executive takes over a lead, your prospect has reached a crucial point in the buyer's experience. It’s do or die. Either the Account Executives effectively address the buyer’s pain points and make a sale, or they don’t, and the deal never leaves the pipeline. Because there is little room for error, customer experience testing is especially important at this stage of the buying cycle.

Through each stage of the buyer’s journey, your testing methodology stays fundamentally the same. In the closing stage, apply the same strategies you used to evaluate Development Executives in presale to monitor your account executives.

Review Discovery Calls

The discovery call is the weakest part of the sales process for many representatives . During this call, representatives? try to understand a prospect’s pain points and position their product or service as the best solution. It’s a crucial part of any sale.

Naturally, you’ll want to monitor your representative's? discovery calls to ensure they’re providing the best possible service. Here’s the problem: Balancing the two elements of a discovery call is tricky under the best circumstances—you’re not doing your representatives? any favors lurking over their shoulders to listen in.?

Just like you did with your Sales Development Executives, record all of your representatives ’ discovery calls. Randomly select a few to review in 1:1s or group training. This method allows you to evaluate discovery calls without throwing your representatives? off their game.?

As you review these calls with your team or individual representatives, keep the conversation constructive. Asking the following questions can help you and your team think critically while keeping the focus on improvement.

1. Does the representative stick to a consistent framework?

If your sales organization has an established framework in place,representatives? should consistently follow those guidelines. Each call will, of course, vary to fit the client’s needs, but the general structure of discovery calls should remain the same.?

As you review calls with your team, adjust the framework based on feedback from representatives and customers. If your sales organization doesn’t have a framework, work with your team to develop one as you review calls. As you build out a set of guidelines, keep your company’s target customers in mind.

2. Has the representative asked enough questions?

No two prospects are exactly alike. To understand each prospect’s unique pain points, representatives? need to let the customer do the talking. Asking a series of questions, especially at the beginning of a call, can help a representative get the customer talking and quickly uncover their primary business problems.

In a study of 519,000 recorded discovery calls, Gong.io found that successful sales representatives? ask between 11 and 14 questions per call. When representatives? asked six or fewer questions, the success rate dropped from 74% to 46%.

As you review calls with your team, keep a tally of questions the rep asks. Invite team members to identify places in the call where a follow-up question could have added additional clarity.

3. Is the representative actively listening to the prospect and giving them time to talk?

While representatives? should be asking questions, they should tailor those questions to each specific prospect. “If you’re too focused on what you’re going to ask next, you aren’t having a conversation,” explains Dan Smith of Winning by Design. “You’re running through a checklist.” Look for signs that your representatives are listening. According to Gong.io, top-performing sales representatives talk only 46% of the time.

4. Has the representative done their homework beforehand?

A representative should never have to ask a prospect about their job title or what their company does. Such questions can easily be avoided with a quick Google search or review of the sales development representative notes prior to the call. This information should also be readily available via account maps and other visual tools. By eliminating these basic questions, your representatives? can dive right into the conversations that lead to sales.

Review Demos

On top of discovery calls, account executives are often responsible for giving product demos. Done right, these calls or meetings can provide the final push a prospect needs to purchase your product. As you review the demos given by account executives, ask these questions about their performance and coach accordingly.

1. Have the Account Executives introduced everyone on the call correctly?

This may seem like a small thing, but it sets the tone for the rest of the meeting. If an account executive introduces everyone with the right title or job function, it adds to their credibility and lets prospects know who they can use as a resource in the future. On the flip side, if an Account executive gets this wrong, it can cause prospects to write them off from the start. And on top of that, it’s just embarrassing—with all of the resources available, from LinkedIn to Salesforce, there’s no excuse for messing this up.

2. Is the representative focused on features or solutions?

Nothing kills a sales call like a list of features—the prospect can find those online.? Representatives should instead focus on selling a solution: How can your product address the customer’s pain points? Specific features might come up during the conversation, but they should not be the main focus of the call.

Often, customers with purchasing power won’t ever use your product. They want to know why their company needs a solution, not how exactly it works. What’s in it for them? Whether it’s increased productivity, better information flow, etc., representatives should make a compelling value proposition.?

3. Does the representative know the product inside and out?

You can’t give a compelling demonstration for a product you’re unfamiliar with. For your employees, using your product should be second nature. That way, their entire focus can be on the customer during demos, not wrestling with the product. 94% of B2B buyers reported that live interactions with “knowledgeable” employees make them more likely to purchase from a company—your representatives? should strive to be those knowledgeable employees.

Ask for Customer And Team Feedback

There are two sides to every sale: the seller (your team) and the buyer. You need to account for both as you test your buyer's experience. No matter how much quantitative data you gather and analyze—KPIs and other measures of your representatives ’ performance—you still need to examine qualitative data: the actual experience customers have. Reach out to customers, both winners and losers, for feedback on their experiences. (Lost customers, the ones that got away, often provide the most useful insights.)

If you conduct your own customer interviews or surveys, consider these questions:

• Did the representative provide relevant content?
• Did the representative follow up promptly?
• What made you decide to purchase or not to purchase?

Review the feedback you receive with your account executives and make any appropriate changes to your existing processes.

After The Sale

Once the deal has closed, the buyer is passed along to your customer success managers and account managers. Over the course of a sale, the account executive collects tons of information about the buyer—information that could help your customer success teams in their post-sale processes.

Nobody wants to repeat the same details over and over again—so don’t subject your buyers to that process. Account executives are responsible for communicating all of the information they have gathered. For each deal, follow up with your customer success team to see if they received enough information from the Account Executives, whether they were brought in early enough, and whether the sales rep set appropriate expectations.?

Your account executives’ involvement ends here, but the customer journey isn’t complete just yet! To learn about testing the post-sale portion of your buyer's journey, read part three of this series.?