Sales isn’t about simply closing a deal and moving on to the next prospect—it’s about forming lasting relationships with your customers. One way you can do this is to focus on creating a stellar customer experience. When you prioritize the customer, you are often rewarded with loyal clients and repeat business.

So, what exactly does the customer experience entail? Put simply, it involves all the emotions and perceptions a customer has with your company over the course of the business relationship.

To create a better customer experience from the get-go, Steve Kearns, a marketing manager for LinkedIn, says sales professionals must create more transparency by bringing down the gates. Instead of making buyers hunt down information and try to find hidden details, he asserts that salespeople should make it as easy as possible for buyers.

In this issue of Promotional Consultant Today, we share Kearns’ thoughts on how sales professionals can create a better customer experience in 2021.

1. Make pricing visible. If you squirm at revealing prices too early in the conversation, you are not alone. Many sales reps prefer to talk through pricing details with their prospects once the conversation has progressed a bit. However, sales professionals must increasingly earn the chance to talk through costs, says Kearns. Buyers today don’t want to have to jump through hoops to get the information they need. Kearns recommends sales reps work with their marketing colleagues to ensure key information is easy to find on the company website.

2. Offer competitor comparisons. Just as you might compare brands for a household product, your prospective buyers want to know how your offering stacks up to others. You can earn their trust by being up front and honest about your solution’s strengths and weaknesses relative to your competitors. If your prices are higher, list that but also show the value you provide. You’ll notice that some trade-offs might be deal-breakers for some companies but non-issues for others, says Kearns.

3. Provide useful, ungated content. Does your organization provide gated or ungated content? Gated content, which involves getting contact information for a desired piece of content, whether that’s an e-book or a whitepaper, is a common practice that often leads to productive sales conversations. However, Kearns advises sales teams to reconsider this practice through a buyer-first lens. Is the content truly useful enough to justify the ask? Does it make sense to put a lead-generation form in front of educational content? Sharing freely means eliminating barriers to access and empowering self-driven decision-makers with useful information, says Kearns.

Sometimes, providing a better experience for your customers means being more transparent. Don’t make prospective buyers guess about what your products and services cost and help them discover how you compare to others in your market. You can also think about freely sharing your content instead of requiring customer information to get it. In this age of more transparent sales, consider how you can be more upfront with your prospects and customers. By doing so, you will create a better customer experience.

Compiled by Audrey Sellers

Source: Steve Kearns is the marketing manager, content and social media for LinkedIn.