Teams | Collaboration | Customer Service | Project Management

Knowing whether or not your company is making a profit is essential to building a successful business strategy. The real question is: Do you know why your company is or isn’t profitable? This is the essence of the sales mix. Sales mix digs deep into the individual percentages and profits of your products so you can determine what stays, what goes, and what gets an update. Not every product is a best-seller, but that doesn’t mean it can’t hold value for the company.

Backordered for months, the couch Sasha ordered had finally come for delivery. Her doorway was narrow, but she had a plan. Which involved, well, a gymnastics routine of flipping and squeezing the boxed couch. Doorway conquered, she gazed down her mile-long hallway. Deep breath, she thought, and hauled. Sure, she lost two fingernails in the process, but this was a big day. The new couch was here! The one she’d pined for, the one that had taken practically the length of a pregnancy term to arrive.

We’ve all heard the phrase “time is money,” and in the sales world, this axiom resonates loud and true. In every company, sales teams work tirelessly to refine the process of persuading customers to buy faster each year. Time is a valuable parameter to measure, and not only in regards to your sales teams and their productivity.

Every company wants to increase productivity in its sales department—that’s a given. What’s not a given, however, is exactly how your company goes about the process. Sales reps spend hours a day recreating work that shouldn’t have to be recreated.

Over the past two years, the Internet has become our conference room, gym, doctor’s office, personal gathering place—basically, our whole life. With consumers spending more time online than ever before, companies have had to rethink their customer service experience. Businesses need to gain a clear understanding of the type of digital interactions customers want instead of relying on intuition.

A great customer experience features efficient and personalized interactions at each step of the buyer’s journey. But in order to achieve this, companies need a way to quickly analyze customer data and act on it. According to the Zendesk Customer Experience Trends Report, businesses that leverage customer data see 36-percent faster resolutions and a 79-percent reduction in wait times; they also solve four times the number of customer requests.

Let’s start with the basics: What is a customer touchpoint? To put it simply, a customer touchpoint is any time a consumer interacts with your brand, whether that’s through an employee, a website, an advertisement, or an app. And the experiences consumers have with those touchpoints can shape how they view your company.

It’s easy to talk about being a customer-first organization. It’s comforting to think that everyone in the organization puts the customer first. This attitude should, in theory, lead to happier customers, better business outcomes, and the type of place anyone would love to work. But defining and executing a customer-first strategy is not as organic as it might seem.

Customer satisfaction has been dropping in the US since about 2018, according to the American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI). The question is why, especially when so many companies are trying hard to meet customer needs on a variety of fronts. There are some general trends that offer clues—for example, customer expectations keep rising. Customers have become much more critical of everything, whether it’s product quality, delivery, or customer service.

When it comes to relationships between individuals, building trust isn’t a very difficult thing to do. It typically requires only a few points of relatability—movies or books you both enjoy, places you’ve visited, and so on—until a level of camaraderie is established. The task becomes infinitely harder, however, when it comes to sales relationships.