Customer Insights: The Gamechanger For Sales Success!

As a salesperson, your ultimate goal is to close deals and increase revenue. But have you ever considered that the key to reaching these goals lies within your customers? It’s true, by utilizing customer insights, you can gain a deeper understanding of your audience, their pain points, and their needs. Armed with this knowledge, you can tailor your approach and messaging to resonate with them on a deeper level, ultimately leading to increased sales.

If you want to personalize your sales experience for new leads, you need to know what your current customers care about. The best way to know that is with a strategy to regularly collect and analyze customer insights to learn about their pain points, motivations, and characteristics in common.

In this guide, you’ll learn what customer insights are, the benefits of customer insights to your sales team, different types of data points to collect, and actionable ways to collect customer insights. Let’s jump straight in.

What are Customer Insights?

Customer insights are qualitative or quantitative data on your customers. Customer insights refer to the understanding and knowledge gained from collecting and analyzing data about customers' behavior, preferences, needs, and demographics. These insights help organizations to make informed decisions about their products, services, marketing strategies, and customer engagement.

In the context of sales, customer insights are essential to develop effective sales strategies that meet customers' requirements and create customer loyalty. By analyzing customer data, sales professionals can gain insights into customer behavior, buying habits, preferences, and pain points. This information enables sales teams to customize their approach to individual customers and deliver personalized experiences that resonate with their needs and expectations. Customer insights also help sales reps identify upsell and cross-sell opportunities, address customer complaints and concerns, and adapt to changing market conditions. Overall, customer insights are critical to improving sales performance and driving revenue growth.

How Can Customer Insights Benefit Your Sales Process?

The more you know about your leads, the easier it will be to start conversations with them and close more deals.

Here are three major benefits of bringing customer insights to your sales process:

1. Ensure Your Sales Team is Focused on the Right Prospects

Targeting is the most critical part of any effective B2B sales process. B2B sales teams need to know:

What characteristics their best prospects have
What their prospects care about
What pain points their prospects want to solve
The best way to get in touch with prospects and leads

You can use your customer insights to build and improve your ideal customer profile model, and in turn, make it easier for your sales team to identify the best-fit prospects to contact. For example, if you know that your ideal customer has characteristics like:

A job title matching “Head of Growth” or “Head of Marketing”
Works at a company doing at least $500m in revenue per year
Has at least five other people on the marketing team

You can then use those insights to improve how you source and target new cold leads. This will have benefits all throughout your sales pipeline software, as every sales lead you connect with will see why your product/service is a good fit for them.

2. Spend More Time Focusing on High-Priority Accounts

The next major benefit of customer insights for sales is that your team can leverage it to spend more time focused on high-priority customers. All businesses will have a core set of customers who are an ideal fit and generate more revenue than the average customer does.

Your customer insights will help you identify who these customers are so your team can spend more time focusing on their accounts, boosting retention and potentially unlocking new revenue opportunities from each one. In practice, this involves analyzing data from your CRM and cross-referencing it with revenue data.

Once you know who your most valuable customers are, you can:

Reach out to them on a regular schedule to see if they’re happy with your product/service
Offer for them to beta test your new features
Work with them on case studies to share with other customers
Ask for product feedback to find opportunities to improve your business

The extra interactions show your most valued customers that you care about helping them succeed and fostering the relationship. Without your customer insights, this wouldn’t be possible and you’d risk isolating them.

3. Create a More Personalized Sales Experience

The ultimate goal of every sales team is to close more deals. Personalization will help you start more conversations over cold email, book more meetings, and, ultimately, close more deals. The data backs it up – McKinsey research has found that the fastest-growing companies get 40% more of their revenue from personalization strategies than their slower-growing counterparts.

The more information you have on your customers based on your research, the easier it will be to add unique personalization to every lead’s sales experience.

Some ways you can add personalization to your sales process include:

Improving your cold email personalization
Personalized follow-up emails based on conversations you’ve had with a sales lead
Sharing unique sales decks that are a fit for every sales lead’s needs

Your personalization efforts will prove to every sales lead that you care about making their unique sales experience high-quality and relevant to their business.

3 Types of Customer Insights to Boost Sales

Customer insights come in multiple forms. But, when it comes to your sales process, you need insights that are actionable and help your team improve their sales targeting, messaging, and qualification process. Here are three types of customer insights that can help:

1. Sales Qualification Characteristics

The first customer insight that’s vital to know is your sales qualification characteristics. In short, it’s any information about your ideal customer that you can use to improve your sales targeting.

For most sales teams, there are three primary categories of criteria you can use to improve your targeting:

Demographic criteria: This includes details like your prospect’s job title, location, income, employment histories, and anything related to personal information.
Firmographic criteria: This includes details like company size, annual revenue, number of employees, headquarters location, and more.
Technographic criteria: This includes information on any software or technology a company uses, such as their website CMS, their CRM, HR tools, and more.

Knowing these criteria ensures that your sales team can filter through lists of prospects and easily qualify leads without relying on luck or intuition. They can then choose to reach out with a relevant, personalized message and start a conversation.

2. Use Case and Jobs to Be Done Data

The next type of customer insight you can use to improve your sales process is use case-based insights. This relates to the tasks your customers use your product or service to complete. Knowing these insights will ensure your team knows how to sell the benefits of your product/service compared to just selling the features.

For example, imagine you run a SaaS company offering a meeting booking platform. Your customer use cases and jobs-to-be-done wouldn’t just be as simple as “easily booking meetings”.

It would be things like:

Making it easier to book calls with sales leads
Allow remote teams to communicate more easily
Reducing the back-and-forth emails it usually takes to schedule a meeting

Once you know the real benefits your customers buy your product for, you can put these insights to work in your sales and marketing messaging. Whenever a potential customer sees your company’s marketing or sales copy, they’ll know it’s worth having a conversation.

3. Customer-Message Fit

Your next insight to consider is your customer-message fit. This helps you understand whether or not your marketing and sales messaging resonates with your target market. The reason you should do this is simple: you need to use the same words your customers do when describing your product/service and their pain points. If your customers don’t fully understand what problem you can solve for them they don't want to buy.

It can be tricky to collect this type of information, because it’s both qualitative and quantitative. You can run A/B tests, use messaging surveys, and spend time talking to your customers to learn what type of messaging your leads and customers understand. But, if you get it right, you ensure that your entire communication strategy is honed in on the value propositions and phrases your customers truly understand.

How to Collect Customer Insights to Improve Sales Process

There are multiple ways to collect customer insights that can improve your sales process. Here are four strategies you can put to work today.

1. Go Through Your CRM and Customer Data

The first-party data stored in your CRM is a goldmine of customer insights. Your team will have made notes and tracked conversations with high-quality and low-quality leads. By taking the time to filter through the interactions, you can extract:

The criteria that your best leads have in common
Sales scripts or email templates that your best leads received
The number of touches it takes to convert leads into customers
The questions each lead asked

You can then translate this data into actionable insights and store it for your team to reference in the future. To make it simple to identify highly qualified vs. poorly qualified, you can use a lead management tool to score leads throughout the sales process. At any point in time, you can easily view leads with high or low scores and analyze the differences between the two.

2. Use Surveys to Learn About Customer Pain Points

Surveys are a powerful way to collect data on your customers.

You can use surveys such as:

Net Promoter Score
Customer Satisfaction Score
Customer Effort Score

These will all help you collect helpful data on how your customers feel about your business. The fastest way to get your surveys in front of your customers is over email. You can use email sequence software to send personalized emails to groups of customers with links to your surveys. If you use a platform like Alchemer or Qualtrics to run your surveys, you can integrate those with Clootrack.

Clootrack will help you parse through the data and pull out the most actionable insights, such as their top purchase drivers, pain points, and more.

3. Schedule In-Depth Calls

As much as collecting quantitative data, your sales team will benefit from qualitative insights. One of the best ways to gather these is with a one-to-one call with your customers. To schedule calls, send a friendly email with a meeting invite and consider offering an incentive like a gift card or discount to improve the meeting booking rate.

Before your call, prepare a list of structured questions that you can ask. However, don’t be afraid to go off-script – this is where you can gather insights that are hard to get otherwise. These will surface key points from the call and ensure you never miss an important point that a customer shared with you.

4. Combine Cross-Channel Data in Clootrack

The more data you have on your customers, the better. Clootrack’s customer analytics platform uses an AI-driven engine to track and analyze customer reviews and survey responses to find out:

What motivates customers to buy from you
Where your customer experience drop-offs are
What pain points your customers want you to solve for them

Your team can use this to identify potential problems and sales opportunities in real-time.

Once you identify customers are reacting in a particular way to a campaign you’re running, you can use those insights to optimize it and improve your results.

Wrapping Up

Customer insights can be used to give your team a competitive advantage. You’ll know what pain points your ideal customers have, the features they care about, and the motivations that drive them to purchase from you. It’s vital to have a customer insights strategy in place to consistently gather and analyze data. Over time, you’ll build up a database of insights that your team can leverage to improve your sales process and grow your revenue.

When you’re ready to start gathering customer insight data in real time, schedule your free demo with Clootrack.

Guest Author Bio

Jeremy Chatelaine is the founder of QuickMail.io, a SaaS company that enables personal one-to-one conversations at scale through automation – for outbound outreach, inbound leads, trial/onboarding, customer communication, and more. Before founding QuickMail, he worked for more than 15 years as a developer in the video game industry and in finance.