One of the best Sales 2.0 tools on the web today are the new online survey services like SurveyMonkey.com, Zoomerage.com and snapsurveys.com. Many organizations use these to do customer satisfaction surveys, but over the years, I’ve developed a system of using them as a client specific sales tool that accelerates the selling process. Your marketing department may have used these services to do a market research project but they have have made the survey process so quick, cheap, and easy that surveys for individual customers you are in the process of selling should now be part of the selling routine.
The most powerful way to use these surveys is to measure the voice of your customer’s customer. While many sales voices get drowned in the din of competition, when your customer hears your same story from THEIR OWN customers it’s as if it were screamed in their ear with a bullhorn. They hear it loud and clear, will believe it, and will act on it.
I pioneered this approach years before the new online survey services existed. On calls I would tell clients that THEIR CUSTOMERS had a strong preference for my product over competition. If skeptical I presented them the following challenge; I would pay for a survey to measure their customer’s preferences. I helped them design a short survey, printed it, stuffed it in envelopes each with a return envelope, put stamps on all envelopes, and handed the whole thing over to them. My client then had a secretary apply the mailing labels of their customers and mailed them out. When a stream of filled out surveys favoring my product rolled in my future sales were assured.I found that even where my competition had long term relationships I would still get the business. No one argues with their own customers.
Today’s online survey services put my old system on steroids. Here's how I do it today; I help my client develop the questions and type them into a preformatted survey form. I then have the survey service generate a link where the survey is posted to be taken. I forward that link to my client. My client simply emails it to their customers asking them to fill it out. The new survey software is simple and quick to use. The process that took me days to set up and weeks to get results from can now be set up in 15 minutes with complete results back in two days.
Accelerate sales? Think about it. When you get your customer's customers to advocate for you, you can replace months of relationship building or proving unique value with a two day ephipahny that ends with your client saying, "Hey our customers say we should switch, how soon can we do it?" If your your organization is not using "voice of customer" surveys for individual clients you are missing one of the greatest sales accelerators of Sales 2.0.
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Surveys can provide an effective means for research, marketing, and customer service. Unfortunately, they typically take a considerable amount of time to create, distribute and collect. Online surveys solve the distributing and result collection problems its 100% true.
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