Get Personal: Use Mobility to Enable Unique and Personalized Customer Interactions

I started feeling nostalgic the other day and decided to take a stroll down memory lane. It led me back to my high school yearbooks. Besides being thankful that the trucker hat phase is over, looking back through the messages that my classmates had written on the front and back pages made me wish that some of those experiences hadn’t ended.

My favorite messages are the ones that mention old inside jokes or recount weird/funny moments that happened during a class. They were personal, and with just a few lines I’m transported back to when the experience actually happened and feel exactly the way I did back then.

So what does this have to do with anything? Well, your greatest asset when going into a meeting with a customer or a prospective customer is contextualized and personal information. Content is great, and you can leverage your company’s brand messaging as hard as you want, but it packs a bigger punch when you can frame it so that it resonates on a personal level.

Personalization accomplishes two key things:

1) You form an immediate connection with a customer because it’s apparent that you’ve taken the time to understand their environment, challenges and goals.

2) You rise above the noise and stand out as a trusted advisor. This will help you make a lasting impression so you are remembered when it comes time for them to make buying decisions.

Proof Behind Personalization:

I recently read an article that had a great graph related to this:

Kimberly White, “IBM 2013 Study”, Forbes

What this graph is telling us, is that the more you can integrate data taken from customer experiences and contextualize around them, the better you’re going to perform. It’s that simple.

How to Get There

Robust content is both a blessing and a curse. There is not enough to supplement a specific discussion point or there is too much content so you can’t find relevant information quickly. As a result, personalization suffers and your interactions don’t have the desired impact. In the end, the steps you take to prep for meetings and the process you use to pull together content that feels personalized isn’t repeatable. Where does this leave you? Don’t throw your hands up in frustration and give up. You have in your hand a transformational piece of technology that can solve these problems: your mobile device.

Now you need the other piece of this equation. A sales enablement application that allows you to organize your sales material, build presentations on the fly and access contextual content in the middle of your meeting without disrupting the flow of your discussion.

        How are you working to make your pitches/presentations more personal to your customers?