As the fiscal year draws to a close, businesses are focused on finalizing budgets and critical spending decisions for Q4.
During this pivotal time, your company needs to remain top-of-mind with your customers.
While gift baskets, swag, or e-cards are well-intentioned, they can feel impersonal and are easily forgotten
Instead, a personal year-end or holiday-themed celebration offers a powerful way to enhance your omnichannel retention and expansion strategies while significantly driving customer loyalty.
This article will explore several key challenges for building customer relationships and argue that tasteful connective moments—such as year-end celebrations—can go a long way in supporting customer relationships.
4 Customer Success Challenges
Today’s customers demand an omnichannel approach to retention.
According to McKinsey, the key isn’t just finding the right channel, but ensuring a seamless experience across all channels and creatively complementing traditional engagement methods.
This comes with four major challenges:
1. Balancing Customer Preference for Digital Interactions with Personal Touch Points
The B2B sales landscape is evolving rapidly. A large percentage of sales interactions are now conducted remotely, making it difficult to maintain connections.
This challenge is reflected in three shifts in buyer preferences:
- Increased desire for self-service: Customers are more comfortable with digital technology and increasingly want more self-service. Gartner estimates that by 2030, 70% of routine sales tasks will be automated.
- Digital-first preference: McKinsey research shows that approximately two-thirds of B2B customers prefer remote and digital interactions over in-person interactions at the ordering or reordering stage of the buyer’s journey.
- Continued desire for human interaction: Two-thirds of customers want some kind of human interaction—either digitally or in person. This percentage has fluctuated very little over the past five years.
This data suggests that even amidst the rise of digital technology in sales, human interaction will continue to be of pivotal importance.
The Solution: Creating Moments to Connect
A recent McKinsey study found that personalization increases market share.
Analytics is key to this personalization, but over-dependence on numbers can have the opposite effect, making customers feel like a data point.
McKinsey suggests that using innovative, unexpected channels is an excellent way to drive sales and build deeper connections with customers.
After all, there’s no inherent conflict between creating personal, connective moments and engaging customers digitally.
2. Upselling Well-Informed Customers
The abundance of online information has fundamentally altered how buyers approach purchasing decisions, reducing the impact of traditional pitch decks.
Research shows that most B2B customers conduct their own research extensively before sellers even have the opportunity to pitch.
This can make it challenging to facilitate expansion conversations, particularly with customers who believe they already possess all the necessary information and thus perceive little value in joining a sales discussion.
The Solution: Create Non-Transactional Value
Invitations to presentations or upselling conversations can often feel like a burden or a waste of time, especially as approximately 71% of B2B buyers say their conversations with sales teams feel too transactional.
The solution lies in finding creative ways to invite customers and stakeholders to interactions that aren’t inherently transactional but intended to enhance their experience with your company.
This can transform how customers perceive their relationship with your brand, making them more receptive to future expansion opportunities.
3. Over-Prioritizing Acquisitions
While growth is a universal business objective, it’s easy to inadvertently overlook the importance of engaging and delighting existing customers in an effort to expand your customer base.
Yet, focusing on existing customers is vital.
Research demonstrates that companies lose 2-3 times more value from churned accounts than they gain through ROI from new acquisition efforts.
The Solution: Delight Your Customers
A significant portion of churn—approximately 54%—stems from a poor-quality digital experience.
Therefore, actively delighting existing customers is crucial, not just acquiring new ones.
Even if customers aren’t immediately ready for upselling conversations, going the extra mile to provide a positive experience is a powerful way to prevent churn.
4. Engaging Senior Stakeholders
To retain and prevent churn, you need to get more senior stakeholders on board.
However, this can be challenging as the higher up the ladder a stakeholder is, the more prospects are trying to reach them.
Research shows that on average, 13 people are involved in purchasing decisions, with 89% involving two or more departments.
This means your outreach, even to your existing customers, needs to be higher and wider to avoid the risk of a single point of failure.
The Solution: Give Sponsors a Reason to Invite Higher-Ups to the Conversation
The most effective way to engage senior stakeholders is by making it easy and appealing for your existing sponsors and champions to bring them into the conversation.
Host a uniquely valuable event: Instead of just inviting them to a pitch, create an event that they’ll find value in—regardless of whether they expand their business with you or not.
Make it easy to join: The more frictionless and accessible your event, the more likely you’ll get stakeholders to join.
The result is a more resilient relationship with multiple points of connection, reducing the risk of churn and creating opportunities for future expansion.
An Actionable Solution: The Unique Value of a Holiday Celebration
Inviting customers to a tasteful virtual Holiday celebration is a simple yet effective way to make them feel valued, not just managed.
An effective celebration can serve several purposes for customer success:
- Create a moment to connect: Creates a moment for more personal connection than analytics-driven emails or phone calls typically provide.
- Delight customers: Distinguishes your company from easily forgotten gestures like gift baskets or e-cards and creates a memory that stakeholders will bring into the new year.
- Seamlessly transition to expansion conversations: Feels non-transactional, even if you find a tasteful way to incorporate a pitch.
- Help you go higher and wider: Gives sponsors a reason to invite senior stakeholders, avoiding the necessity of contending with gatekeepers—since you can invite both the gatekeeper and the stakeholder.
Ultimately, these celebrations can help you stand out from competitors, creating a positive, lasting memory that stakeholders will associate with your brand.
Take Action with Teamraderie’s Holiday Experiences for Sales Leaders
Teamraderie’s Holiday experiences are an excellent, actionable solution for hosting a frictionless experience that your customers will want to join.
Our experiences have the following key benefits:
- Virtual format: Seamlessly blends customer desires for human interaction with technology, allowing you to invite more stakeholders.
- Frictionless: We handle the logistics, making the process as easy as possible for you.
- Personalized invitations: Send customers a personalized note, giving them a clear reason to say yes.
- Engaging: Our experiences are expert-led, fun, and interactive.
After using Teamraderie for customer success, sales leaders at peer companies saw the following results:
- 78% of customers felt more connected to their account manager.
- 65% of customers saw more value in their relationship with the company.
If you’re interested in exploring more about how we can help you host an unforgettable year-end celebration for your customers, click here.