Many of the assignments we receive from our clients aim to support a simple question that they present: What else can we do to keep our customers happy and using our product?
We have discovered that this is one of these cases where a simple and short act of prevention can save you a long and hard period of damage control. Here are 4 tips to make sure you utilize your Competitive Intelligence tool properly.
While ongoing market intelligence programs are rightly focused on enabling sales to acquire new customers, they can also be used to retain and prevent churn of existing customers.
As the probability of selling to an existing customer is 60-70%, and only 5-20% to sell to a new prospect (Source: ISS), here are 4 market intelligence steps you can take in order to reduce churn.
1. Control the Narrative
In the red ocean of a market saturated with competitors, new buzzwords are drawing attention. Over 50% of the content from top brands is poor and irrelevant to customers, and there is a 72% correlation between content effectiveness and a brand’s meaningfulness (Source: Vivendi).
As customers are listening and keen to adopt innovation, your competitors can take advantage of that and turn a new feature in their technology into changing their marketing pitch. Who song us didn’t encounter AI, Machine Learning, Analytics lately as the new big thing? Therefore, pay attention to changes in the wording of your competitors’ messaging and respond accordingly.
2. Leverage Competitors' Drawbacks
Your competitor's failures are one of your best tools to reduce churn. 34% of clients will never buy from a brand after just one single bad experience (Source: Oracle), so by tracking the negative reviews of your competitor's products, you can prepare for potential dissatisfaction among your customers. Identify common patterns of criticism and make the necessary changes to initiate preventative measures.
You can investigate thoroughly what are the drawbacks that clients have to say about the alternative solutions, and equip your sales and marketing teams to refer cleverly to them in your pitch, influencing decision-makers from choosing those solutions over yours.
Incorporating these insights in Battle Cards will actively assist sales representatives to guide prospects toward seeing the value in your solution that a client needs to go from inertia to decision.
3. Capitalize Customer Stories
Customer stories seem like a simple and banal marketing tool, but you can exploit them smartly. 62% of clients share their bad experiences with other people (Source: Salesforce), so investing time and effort in asking clients to describe why they are satisfied can provide not only competitive insights about what makes a customer stay, but also raise actual customer loyalty as they will also tell themselves why not leave and even more importantly: inform you when competitors are contacting them and what they offered.
4. Analyze The Demand-Side
Analyzing customer needs, in general, can help you sharpen your understanding of your existing clients, and even to educate them about other use cases. This dissembling exercise of demand-side requirements will champion your efforts in concept development, product development, value analysis, sales RFPs and more. Other than identifying the different types of customer needs that the analysis might turn up, such as price, usability, convenience, support effectiveness, formulation, you can also learn how to segment your client base and run a targeted retention strategy.
A common tool for demand-side analysis is Customer Sentiment Analytics, using a set of methodologies for gathering, standardizing, and analyzing buyer feedback on the various products or services in the market.
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