Conversational Marketing

Chapter 15 Continuing the Conversation The Importance of Talking to Your Customers

What’s the first thing you want to do after making a sale? Put your feet up on your desk and relax? Do a happy dance? Go to happy hour? Of course, it’s always fun to celebrate your successes. But—and I don’t mean to sound like a buzzkill here—what companies should really be thinking about after a sale is made is not how they’re going to celebrate, but how they can support that new customer and make him or her as successful as possible.

While it’s easy to see closing a deal as the final step of the marketing and sales process, the reality is that when leads become customers, marketing and selling don’t stop. Instead, the way you market and sell to those customers needs to evolve. When the pre-sale conversation ends, the post-sale conversation should begin.

By applying the principles of conversational marketing and sales after a sale and having one-to-one conversations on a regular, ongoing basis, you’ll be able to gather tons of customer feedback, which you can then use to improve your product, your processes, as well as the overall customer experience your company is providing.

Before we explore how you can set up a continuous customer feedback loop and make the customer feedback you gather actionable (which we’ll do later in this chapter), let’s first take a deeper dive into why conversations are so crucial to the overall experience a customer has after he or she buys.

Creating an Incredible ...