But, as in any other aspect of business, there are some B2C sales tips and B2C sales strategies that can help you generate more sales and succeed in competitive market of B2C sales. B2C company is focused on individual consumers, and B2C customers have much more options to choose from, which makes email marketing, social media marketing, loyalty programs, and other tactics of processing your target audience essential aspects of B2C product development.
Let’s start.
What is B2C sales?
B2C sales model refers to “business to customer”, which means it includes sales conducted by manufacturers or service providers to individual customers for personal use. B2C (Business to Consumer) sales models are used by such businesses as retail, online stores, service sector, supermarkets, entertainment, healthcare, and so on. Even though B2C sales strategies always are focused on providing the product or service to a final individual buyer, they can be also provided indirectly - with the involvement of intermediaries. Obviously, B2C sales work both offline and online.
Key difference between B2C and B2B brands and B2B buyers lies in the lenght of sales cycle, value of one deal, customer lifetime value, marketing budget, digital marketing strategies, sales pitches, and so on - but in fact, they are quite the same in terms of sales efforts, marketing materials and sales funnels.
How does the B2C sales process work?
The B2C sales process is a bit different from the B2B sales process, but nonetheless, there is nothing especially complicated about it. B2B marketers can close one deal in a quarter, but yet such prospective customers can be valuable enough to generate good revenue alone.The B2C sales process has 6 stages, which we are going to describe below.
B2C Sales Process Stage 1: Lead Generation and Outreach
This sales process stage, even though it is more common for online business, relates to all B2C sales strategies and business models. Before people will buy from you, they have to be aware of you and understand the benefits of your offers compared to competitors. Thus, everything starts here. To let people acknowledge your business, numerous B2C sales techniques and strategies can be used: online and offline advertising, discounted offers, B2C telesales, etc.
B2C Sales Process Stage 2: Needs Assessment
To make your products and services competitive, you have to clearly understand unique needs and expectations of your target market regarding your offers. Nonetheless, people won’t come to you and say what they need everytime - you have to make the offer suitable for the customer before your competitors will do the same, so needs assessment is a fundamental part of B2C sales process. You can start collecting feedback from customers about your products and services, ask what they lack, what are the pros and cons of your goods, and therefore, you will find out the improvement areas for further development.
B2C Sales Process Stage 3: Product Presentation
This is a B2C sales process stage where the customer comes directly to the salesman - or vice versa - and the client is ready to be acknowledged for the product. At this stage, the sales team can use all their B2C sales skills to advertise the advantages of the product, overcome objections, and overally do their best to convince the customer to complete the deal.
B2C Sales Process Stage 4: Closed Sales with Follow-Up
When all customer objections are addressed, and the B2C sales process is coming to its end in the terms of selling, salesman has to do his best to guide the customers through the payment and delivery process, thus making sure that overall customer satisfaction is at high level. It is also important to come back with a customer survey for collecting customer feedback closely after the deal is done.
B2C Sales Process Stage 5: Customer Service
Even though the B2C sales process seems to be completed at this point, it can be considered as only started. Why? Well, because now it is only your responsibility to ensure customer retention after the sale is made - because even one poor customer experience can make the client to leave your business and switch to competitor. As you know, customer acquisition costs from 8 to 25 times more expensive than customer retention, so being unable to ensure good quality of customer service and effective customer experience management strategy will make you lose more money than you could expect.
B2C Sales Process Stage 6: Customer Feedback
This stage of B2C sales process is also continuable, from the moment of customer interaction to another. Nevertheless, it is also essential for your business to be aware of customer feedback, and not only collect it, but make decisions and changes based on it. One of the most popular customer concerns about business is that it always collect feedback but never react on it - so imagine the benefits you will get by not proving this belief on your example.
The sales funnel for B2C strategy works the same as it works for B2B customers, with the use of the same social channels, buyer personas and content marketing tips.
How to improve B2C sales? Top B2C sales techniques
1. Personalize customer experience
Even though this one of B2C sales tips refers more to digital businesses, it covers all B2C sales. Expenses on customer experience personalization will not be very high, but even by adding some simple features as personal account for customer, or just by collecting customer data and providing personalized service during customer interactions. Even such a small detail as greeting customers by their names or understanding their previous interactions can significantly increase customer loyalty and customer satisfaction which will also have a positive impact on B2C sales by easing buying decisions and making buying cycle shorter. You can also use retargeting programs for B2C audiences, which can work effectively with personalized product offerings provided through preferred B2C marketing channels.
2. React on customer feedback
Customer feedback, as we have already mentioned, exist not only to be collected, but mostly as a source of information about improvement areas of your business and also key problems that affect customer experience or your products. Thus, it is quite strange that many businesses ignore customer feedback and keep experiencing negative consequences of their ignorance through years, which often leads to high customer churn and everything that follows from it. It is also especially important to collect customer feedback regularly and measure it separately for different stages of B2C sales cycle and the entire customer journey.
3. Provide B2C sales training to sales reps
The people who sell, both in B2B and B2C, are sales representatives. Yes, it isn’t actual for a grocery store on a corner, but it is for every online store. When it comes to sales, every single phrase matters - customer can change their mind and stop buying after asking one question that won’t get answered - and this is especially true for small businesses that can’t afford to hire big sales teams led by true professionals - thus, you will have to build a professional team from scratch. A properly designed and tested sales training program has to include numerous stages - from learning specific skills to working with objections and gaining hard skills - but it will result in great improvement in your sales performance.
4. Be accessible through channels
In the B2C industry, there is one vital thing to keep in mind - the market is more competitive compared to the B2B industry, as more customers and more businesses are operating in the same field respectively. This makes it easier for customers to find almost similar options on the market, which means even 20 seconds delay in your answer to a customer’s questions can result in a lost deal. Thus, there is no other way to deal with it than becoming more accessible and effortless to get in touch with - and this can be done by offering multichannel or omnichannel communication strategy with digital channels included, such as web chats, social media channels and messengers. Thus you will not only free agents on a phone line, but also help different customer segments use preferred channels, therefore improving customer satisfaction.
5. Work with objections
Not working with customer objections in B2C sales strategy is one of the most common, yet still one of the biggest challenges. Sometimes it is caused by poor performance of the sales team or its low qualifications, but also it may be caused by lack of understanding of customer preferences and customer expectations, which leads to liability to understand why customers act as their act. Thus, you have to start from analyzing the rating of most common customer objections - and use brainstorming to find the best solutions for each of these objections.
6. Be fast
As we have already mentioned, one of the most common issues in B2C sales strategy which can cause low sales and poor customer experience is slow customer service and slow response time. This is why there is a popular benchmark for customer service, which is called service level with an 80/20 correlation. It can be explained as “80% of customer queries should be answered during 20 first seconds since the customer call was initiated”. In other words, the faster you respond to customers, the higher is the chance to get the deal closed.
7. Focus on quality of customer service
Customer service, from the first view, doesn’t have any direct impact on quality of your product, which means that imperfections of your products can’t be resolved with the use of perfect customer service only, but perfect customer service is the only thing that will help you to save the customer even during conflict situations and thus establish positive relationships with the customers. Therefore, there is no other way to ensure customer retention than to improve customer service - by reacting to customer feedback, providing customer service personalization and self-service options - but also focusing on customer service will help to avoid losing clients due to customer service issues.
8. Use cross-sales and up-sales opportunities
One of the best ways to improve your revenue from sales is to use up-selling and cross-selling opportunities. To put it shortly, up-selling is about offering an upgraded version of the product or service customer is looking for, and cross-selling is about offering additional products or services to the main product which can improve its value or usability for the customer. To use these options, sales reps have to be properly trained and experienced, which again brings us back to the importance of B2C sales training.
9. Focus on B2C sales skills
This is not only about training B2C sales strategy, but also about hiring in your B2C sales strategy, The key B2C sales skills include communication skills, stress-resistance, conflict resolution skills, readiness to overcome objections, fast reaction and active listening. Thus, if your sales teams lack those skills, you have to focus on providing them with appropriate training.
10. Try B2C telesales
When inbound sales aren’t enough for you, try to go outbound. Thus, you will get a cheap source of new customers which can be processed fast and without involving any high-value software or hiring high-paid specialists. You can use telesales as a B2C sales strategy for selling to current customers, or potential customers through cold calls. You can also easily find new lead generation techniques that can be used to expand your customer base.
Conclusion
As you can see, there are many B2C sales strategies and B2C sales techniques that can significantly increase your sales and boost your performance without high expenses and investments in it. You have to remember that B2C market is much more competitive than B2B, which means your success depends only on your readiness to adopt new sales practices and adaptability to market requirements, and also on tools you use.
You have to build a community of loyal customers to ensure stability of your business and invest in customer acquisition, as B2B consumers bring much more value than in the case of B2C model, which means you have to expand your customer base. Invest in marketing teams, use proper B2C marketing tactics, monitor buying process, track consumer behavior, use email campaigns and measure conversion rates for different channels.
