3 Key Stages of the Customer Life Cycle
Sales is more than just closing a deal. Great salespeople build entire relationships with their customers that span decades. Like any relationship, customers will be loyal to companies that are willing to nurture them.
Customer Life cycles vary for every company depending on the nature of their business, their products, and their services. There are three key stages that every prospective customer in every industry goes through before they become customers.
The Three Key Stages of a Customer Life cycle
Attract
The Attraction stage of the Customer Life cycle is a joint effort by the marketing and sales departments. In this stage, companies either reach out to their customers through campaigns or create avenues by which interested customers can find them.
It’s a combination of education on what their business can do for their customers and how it fits their individual needs. Besides having a great product, it’s also about how comfortable a customer is associating with their brand and directing customers towards physical or online channels where they can avail of the product or service. It also utilizes social proofs such as endorsers, reviews, or testimonials.
Engage
Once customers know about your products and services and where to find them, the next step is making the purchase. Ideally, companies should always follow up with customers afterward to make sure the purchasing processing is up to standard – quick, easy, and painless.
The engagement period is also when customers give their verdict on whether or not your company’s products or services are worth the value you are charging. Should your customers have any issues, this should be reported back to teams in charge to improve the experience.
Retain
After the initial happy purchase, the next step is keeping them happy. Companies spend a lot of resources convincing customers that their product or service is worth it. Nurture your existing relationships encourage repeat purchases that will cost less than you find new customers.
How To Nurture Your Customers In Every Stage
Before you can reach the stage where you can expect customers to be loyal to you, you need to earn your customer’s respect and trust. But how do you that? You should be consistent. Each stage requires a seamless passing of hands between various departments within an organization. Customers should always feel like companies are speaking to them in a singular voice through each stage of a cycle.
Making Sure Your Brand Is Consistent
Having a clean, updated, and accurate data in your CRM system will mean the difference before loyal customers and those who will jump ship the moment a better offer comes along. Sales enablement platforms like Hey DAN help make that consistent voice a reality. Hey DAN makes sure that your data is not only clean through their data clean up and management services, but also analyze opportunities and follow-up for you.
Never miss important moments. Always be there for your customer.