Leave No Sale Behind: Supercharge Growth By Integrating Sales With Service

Hacksaw Ridge tells the true story of Desmond Doss who served as a combat medic in World War II at the Battle of Okinawa. He was the first and only conscientious objector to receive the Medal of Honor for actions above and beyond the call of duty during World War II. He brought belief, integrity, courage, and heroism together to deliver amazing results in saving lives as he charged into the hell of battle without a weapon.

 

Consistent with the US military code, he didn't want to leave anyone behind.

In business, customers seek one primary thing from salespeople: a solution to a problem or a challenge from someone who truly understands them. Every business should commit to not leaving any customer behind and therefore to empowering everyone in their team, from every facet of the business, to heroically deliver what customers expect and need... exceptional personal service.

The age of the empowered customer has kicked down those old cubicle walls that previously separated sales and service teams. Customers now expect personalized and unified information from the first person who answers their call, opens their email or reads their social message and it doesn’t matter to them which department they sit in. 

If a business can’t provide this experience, all it takes is a quick browse online for an eager competitor to pounce. It’s not only tech-savvy millennials who are voting with their feet -70% of consumers and 82% of business buyers surveyed in the recent State of Sales Report from Salesforce agreed that technology has made it easier than ever to switch suppliers or service providers.

So, is it as simple as rounding up your sales and service teams and throwing them in a room together? 

If only it were that easy.

Map the customer journey 

You would be surprised at the number of businesses, large and small, that have no idea what their individual customer’s journey looks like in real life. This is a critical first step in aligning your teams. 

Firstly, challenge each team member to play the role of a customer in your business. They need to see through the customer's eyes and walk in their shoes. During this exercise, they must process and predict every touch point, decision, barrier, question and pain point. Chances are, the sales and service employees will identify things they could do differently or how they could improve the way they work together to ensure that the customer can seamlessly purchase your product or service and become an advocate in the market.

"Place an empty chair in every meeting to represent the customer. They are the most important person there so consider them as you discuss strategy, manage issues and make decisions." [paraphrase] Jeff Bezos, Amazon Founder and CEO

Break down barriers

As I said earlier, if you have partitions in your office, pull them down. Collaboration and communication between sales and service people are paramount to providing the ultimate customer experience (CX). Recent Accenture research revealed that legacy business structures and siloed management practices are putting constraints on employees. In fact, 73% of executives surveyed in the Technology Vision 2017 report said that corporate bureaucracies are stifling innovation and productivity.

The only difference between sales and service roles in my view is when they’re in front of the customer: sales do the deal and set expectations, and service seeks to meet or exceed those expectations after they’ve signed the dotted line. 

It’s important to realize that one couldn't survive without the other, so it's up to business leaders to encourage a culture of sharing data, collaborating, integrating and talking to each other. The result: you have fewer silos, more internal touch points, better lines of communication, and better processes, which all lead to better customer experiences. 

Customers want a personal consultant, not a sales or service rep

Customers today expect a highly personalized online shopping experience, so why wouldn't they expect the same in a store, office or showroom? 

By connecting the two customer-facing departments and empowering them with a complete 360-degree view of the customer, they can enhance the customer experience, drive growth, loyalty, and advocacy. We all know what it’s like to be greeted by name at your local restaurant, this should be the case in any business regardless of who they speak to or how they engage at any given moment.

For instance, real estate website, Domain, integrated their Homepass app with their CRM to replace the old pen and paper open home check-in process with a seamless mobile experience. Each customer’s buying journey was recorded, analyzed and integrated to the agent’s CRM. The technology ensured real estate salespeople and the service call centers had the right data and information to have personalized conversations with the right customer at the right time. 

Sell smarter, not harder

I hate to hark on about the end of the old sales or service model, but change is happening right now. By 2020, 51% of consumers and 75% of business buyers expect companies to anticipate their needs and make relevant suggestions before customer contact. 

This can only be achieved if:

• Your business and employees know their customer journeys like clockwork.
  
• Leaders encourage and set an example for a culture of collaboration and data sharing. Leadership is behavior, not posters or slogans.
  
• Barriers between customer facing roles are abolished
  
• Salespeople sell smarter, not harder. This means leveraging the power of technology to make sense of masses of disparate sales and service data we have at our fingertips to provide meaningful insights, predictions, and actions.
   

     

Author Bio: Tony Hughes is a bestselling author, award-winning blogger and the most read LinkedIn Author globally on the topic of B2B sales leadership. Tony’s first book is a business bestseller with his second book, COMBO Prospecting, is available on Amazon here. He can be found on LinkedIn and at TonyHughes.com.au and RSVPselling.com

• Topic Participants

• Vinit Tibrewal

  

• Sticky Posts

• As Sales Person, Here are my New Year Resolutions. What are Yours?

  Being a salesperson, I keep learning from my mistakes and have noted a few changes that I need to make in my approach. I take these resolutions going into 2021, hoping to keep it going for as long as possible :) 1. I will not say "Yes, our product has

• Once Upon a Sales Meeting!

  It was an awkward silence in the meeting room "Uproar." John Kowalski, the new sales manager, was not happy with the team's performance. After scribbling something in the notepad, he decided to break the silence, John: I cannot believe you guys have been working like this. No reports, delusional forecasting, random targets, and no eye on the ball. Kevin: We followed Richard's orders. John: Well, Richard is not here anymore, is he? John walked up to the whiteboard, and wrote in big bold letters: "TARGET

• Recent Topics

• How to Display a Logo Image on a Public Form?

  I would like to display a logo image in the header of a form. To achieve this, I added an Add Notes field to the form. The code below works perfectly for Zoho users accessing the form. However, when the form is made public, the image does not load properly:

• Customize Section

  I know it has to be in the themes somewere but where is it that you can change the divider color of a section?

• Customer Feature Requests

  Like Zoho, we're a software company that markets an SaaS product. We frequently get feature requests that come from the support system. My technicians have a responsibility to listen to our customer requests and add them. Right now the only way to do

• the expected input type is jsonarray

  I keep getting an error when creating a record in CRM via a Zoho Form. CRM has a pick list field "Type". All Form entries from this form will ALWAYS be "Volunteer", therefore we do not ask them what their Type is. I am trying to use Set Value to create

• fetch records from analytics table from creator

  I have a creator workflow that I am working in that will compare data from within the app to a table in zoho analytics. Is there a way to fetch a record from Analytics? I have attempted a custom connector with analytics and tried to use it with invoke

• Remove County field from Customer Address input screen (or allow input to be deleted)

  We are in the USA and have just noticed that there is now a County field in the Customer Address input screen (and maybe other areas of Zoho Books, but this is the one affecting us at the moment). County is not important to our business, and in fact we

• Card payment surcharge?

  Hi, I would like to offer my customers the ability to pay invoices by card (using the PayPal integration). However, PayPal charges me around 5% to receive a card payment, and I would like to pass on this cost to my customer by way of a card payment surcharge. Is there any way for Zoho Invoice to be set up to automatically add a defined "card processing fee", say 5% of the invoice total, if the customer elects to pay by card? I don't want to add this on to invoice manually, since most of my clients

• Cant add contact mail. cant find it

  Hi, I am writing a new message and when I enter the contact address that is in my address book, zoho cannot find it. Previously there was no problem. I wrote the first two characters and it shows me all the contact.

• Customer Parent Account or Sub-Customer Account

  Some of clients as they have 50 to 300 branches, they required separate account statement with outlet name and number; which means we have to open new account for each branch individually. However, the main issue is that, when they make a payment, they

• Creating a text box background with round corners in Campaigns

  Hello fellow Campaigns users, Is it possible to create a non-square text box? So with rounded off corners. Like the image that I added below. The shadow effect would be cool too, but I guess that would be more difficult (if possible). I suppose this can

• Image field in custom module

  Hi guy, Is there any hope of adding a custom image field in the custom module? We created a custom module to keep track of assets, and it would be helpful if we could attach an image to the record. Thanks Rudy

• Team can't view their created ticket through Followed Tickets

  Hello Everyone, in our organization we are new to zoho desk we have multiple teams, and each team handles specific topics and tickets when one of them tries to create a ticket for another team and use followed tickets to view this ticket we get a message

• Function #61: Automatically add free item to the invoice based on item quantity

  Hello everyone, and welcome back to another Custom Function Friday! During holiday seasons or special promotions, businesses offer deals like BOGO (Buy One, Get One), Buy 3 Get 1 Free, Buy 2 at 50% off, and much more to attract customers. These promotions

• Use color coding for picklist field values to enhance visual representation

  It's easier and more efficient to manage a large volume of data in a ticket or other custom module records, such as ticket priorities and issue types, when you apply clear visual distinctions through color coding. Color-coded picklist fields allow users

• Creating a support request / ticket via email to xxx@zohosupport.com

  Is there the ability to create a ticket from an email sent to my support email address (e.g. xxx@zohosupport.com)? For example, I am running a small computer support/service business and I would like to be able to direct potential customers to send an

• Call transcrition working for ringcentral?

  I don't see anything about what telephony providers can be used. The Zoho support person A said that RingCentral isn't supported. Zoho support person B said that it works, just make sure the call recording link works. Excellent instructions here: Call

• Setting up CRM for RFP workflow management

  This will be the first time our organization uses an off-the-shelf CRM, transitioning from our homegrown custom solution, and I would appreciate general thoughts on how to get started in general with our workflow using Zoho CRM. The main question: if

• Introducing Appointment Title Customization

  Hi all, We're delighted to announce an exciting feature, Appointment Title Customization, which you can use to personalize your appointment title according to your business's specific needs and preferences. An appointment title provides a glimpse of the

• Custom Module

  I've created a custom module in Zoho Recruit for a separate list outside of qualified candidates. On the module, I use First name and Last Name in separate lines. On the top of the module and when I search a person, it only shows the first name at the

• How to merge duplicate products?

  merge duplicate products

• Rollup summary for custom module

  Rollup summary feature was introduced almost a year ago: https://help.zoho.com/portal/en/community/topic/introducing-rollup-summary-in-zoho-crm-public-early-access-2023 It does not support custom modules tough and this post aims to track such feature

• Foreign Currency Bank Account

  I have a bank account in USD zero balance but when i run the bank ledger in my company currency in AED it was shown small balance 1.31 AED , how to make it zero also ,Thanks

• "Trigger flow for each entry" not working

  I've read this article on how to trigger a flow for each entry in my array. https://help.zoho.com/portal/en/kb/flow/user-guide/create-a-flow/articles/webhook-trigger#Trigger_flow_for_each_entry I cannot get the flow to run for each variant in this JSON

• migrating from Zoho Invoices (CRM) to Zoho Books

  Good day, I was wondering if there was a easy way to migrate all the quotes and invoices from Zoho Invoices CRM to Zoho Books. We plan to move to using Zoho Books in a few weeks and would like to have all the quotes and invoices from the past 3 years

• Edit specific job page on carreer site

  Hey, I was wondering how I could change the layout of a specific job page? (when you go to the carreer website and then click on a job listed there). When I go to customization I can edit the carreer website but I seem to be only able to edit the first

• CRM - Clearing a Subform

  I seem incapable of working out subform functions without assistance.  I've searched, but can't seem to find anything that works. I have a subform that gets filled in when a Zoho Sign document is completed but the fields don't match with the original field values held on CRM (I did have it automatically update, but some fields were being filled in with terrible data, so had to put a stop to it).  There are 4 fields on the subform: Field Name Original Value New Value Update Update is automatically

• Automatically add a retainer to every estimate

  Hi all, I've been trying to find a way to automatically add a retainer at a set % to every estimate we create and send. So far I haven't been successful, does anyone know of a way to do this? Thanks,

• Planning Sales visit to local lead, contacts

  Hello, We have our leads and contacts in CRM. One sale is asking me how he can view all leads and contacts (ideally on a map) in a given area (city or country or "region") so he can plan visiting them. What can be done or need to be developed to have

• Force Sync Contact/Account from CRM to Books

  Hi all. This might not be a common issue to the large portion of the user base here, but for those who dabble and use CRM and Books integration, they know how painful it is that we have to wait for the 2-hour intervals for the records to sync; especially

• Workflow for "Expenses" module?

  Hi there, over the last 2 years, Zoho Expense has seen tremendous growth and we are happy with it. But, sometimes it is frustrating to see things are being implemented halfheartedly, or so it seems. For example, There is the possibility to create workflows

• When is partial reimbursement going to be launched?

  Hi there. I saw somewhere that the partial reimbursement feature is in the work. What is the update and ETA of that? Our clients and prospects have been asking us and we agree that that is an important feature to have.

• IP Address List > Sigma

  We have developed a ZohoCRM extension that utilizes API calls to our server from Deluge scripts and Widgets. Our API server has IP restrictions in place. To ensure successful communication, we require a list of IP addresses utilized by Zoho's platform

• Zoho CRM Canvas Copy Original Layout

  Hello all, I want to use Canvas to make small changes to certain views, not to make huge changes. Is it possible to copy the original Zoho layout and set-up and start from there? I checked and all I can find are some templates which are far from the original

• ZOHO Nightmare

  I am writing as a long-time Zoho user who has faced significant challenges implementing your platform for my business. As a New York-based real estate broker, I have invested over $10,000 and nearly two years trying to integrate Zoho CRM with my WordPress

• Approval system in Books/expenses

  Hi In Books Is there a way to do the following: 1) Submitter to know the balance in Budget/cashflow before sending the amount for approval? 2) Approver to know the same as 1 above? In Expenses, is the above possible?

• attaching pdf to a bill using REST api

  I'm trying to attach a pdf to a bill using REST and curl. The problem is the example in that section in the API reference document does not show how to actually submit the file. It only shows the headers used. I've been trying many variations of this

• How to Open .mbox file in Gmail with Attachments?

  Gmail offer users to backup INBOX folder in .mbox file format via Google Takeout Feature. Howver there is no such option to Restore Gmail MBOX. Thus I would like to suggest you to choose an alternate approach i.e. MBOX to Gmail Wizard. This utility will open .mbox file in Gmail with attachments.  Steps to open MBOX file in Gmail are; Run MBOX to Gmail Wizard Click Add File and add .mbox file. Enter your Gmail login credentials. Click Convert button. Finished! This is how you can open MBOX file in

• How to create comparison time periods like these examples

  In a Pivot Report I would like to be able to select any date range and show a set of metrics for that date range e.g. revenue, orders, units sold. I would then like to be able to compare to the previous period based on the amount of days on the selected

• Custom fields for calls and an enhanced call creation form

  Greetings, I hope you're all doing well. We're happy to announce a few recent enhancements we've made to Bigin's Calls module. We'll go over each one in detail. Enhanced call creation form in Bigin What is this enhancement about? This update includes

• Customize user data collection with User Layouts

  Users denote the people in your organization who work on agile projects using Zoho Sprints. You can add them to your workspace and associate them with required projects. Organizations have distinct requirements in collecting user data. Apart from the

• Next Page