Bandersnatch And The Future Of Customised Sales

When Zuckerberg was pulled in front of Congress to answer how he could run a free service and still make money, he simply answered:

“Senator. We run ads.”

Facebook, Alphabet and every front-runner in b2b recognises that the modern gold rush is in cultivating insightful data and turning it into better customer experiences.

Taking a deeper understanding of your prospects and creating more personalised purchasing journeys for them.

Netflix now accounts for over 10% of all TV viewing across America and its rapid growth is bedded in how good the experience has become for the individual.

People are willing to pay a premium price for a hyper-personalised experience and that dovetails into how you are collecting, pooling and using data.

How are your sales teams collecting more information, useful information and information from across multiple channels and departments?

How are they then connecting that to every sales engagement they have with prospects.

Selling to thousands of individuals

It’s often said that when the product is free it’s more than likely that you’re probably not the customer, you’re the product.

Even when it’s not free, every touch-point you have with a service or company is shaping what that product becomes for you.

It’s a brave new world where the customer has begun to determine their own sales experience and customise their own service.

I recently spoke about how b2b sales is ultimately the same as b2c – that behind every purchase it’s an individual or a group of individuals with a need.

It stands to reason that the more you understand and personalise that journey, the more likely people are to purchase from you.

The aim is to match the levels of in-store catering that a high-end brand like Tiffany’s would provide.

That means individual, helpful, timely engagements that evolve with every interaction you have with a customer.

Where sales is moving in 2020 and beyond

Look at Brooker’s Bandersnatch, the introduction of a plot-your-own-course viewing experience where we choose how the story unfolds.

You might have mixed feeling towards it, or wonder how much you actually changed the events, but it’s an indication of where platforms like Netflix are moving.

And where b2c travels, b2b follows.

Hyper-personalisation is nothing new but we’re moving past setting-up sales triggers, personas and segmented cadences toward a playing field where the customer constructs their own service.

Every customer, prospect or buyer has an individual experience of your service and a different engagement. It goes back to Bezos’s vision of creating 4.5 million stores for 4.5 million customers.

Now, where it gets really smart, is how SaaS platforms are building these deeper relationships at scale and how AI is helping personalise it all behind the scenes.

How are you accelerating the way you collect insightful data, the way you integrate it and how you then build personalised journeys off the back of it?

Just look at the Amazon ecosystem – its deep knowledge of its customers makes Amazon a rival to every business in the world. They have the ability to move into any market and delight their customers.

Delight your customer and you win their business.