Use gifting for sales activities to foster long-standing business relationships and humanize the sales process to reduce churn and increase engagement.
Key Takeaways:
- Corporate gifting serves as a strategic tool to strengthen business relationships, humanize the sales process, and improve engagement, ultimately reducing churn and boosting conversion rates.
- Sales professionals face longer cycles, administrative burdens, and engagement difficulties. Gifting can help overcome these obstacles by acting as a personalized touchpoint at various sales stages, from lead generation to post-sales actions.
- Thoughtful and well-timed gifts, such as direct mail, shareable gift links, and customized rewards, can open communication channels, create emotional connections, and accelerate decision-making during deal closures.
- Offering referral incentives and appreciation gifts post-sale can increase customer retention, encourage repeat business, and drive higher profitability, as referred customers tend to be more valuable in the long run.
A recent survey has revealed that at least 70% of sales professionals believe their jobs have become increasingly difficult in comparison to the previous years, citing these hardships to longer sales cycles, administrative burdens and the need for deeper customer engagement.
This stat underlines the growing complexity of sales activities, where professionals often have to juggle the competitive world of commerce and corporate dealings. Technological tools, customer relations and a rapidly changing marketplace are all contributing factors to the difficulties sales teams face. There is light at the end of the tunnel though. Corporate gifting is one such light, acting as a beacon for sales professionals to optimize their approaches and maximize their efforts. Leveraging gifting for sales activities as a strategic tool enables professionals to put their best foot forward and forever change the way they work. Doing so, will keep their sales dynamics relevant, motivated and ever-evolving.
In this blog, we’ll take a closer look at the various stages of the sales cycle and how gifting can influence these phases for a more customer-centric approach.
The Sales Cycle: How to Implement Gifting for Sales Activities
From lead generation and lead qualification to closing deals and post – sales actions, let’s delve into the four pillars of the sales process and find out how to use gifting to impact the outcomes.
Lead Generation
Lead generation is one of the most effective methods of sales and marketing – when implemented strategically. Honing in on an optimized approach would be advantageous for businesses to advance their precise targeting and robust nurturing strategies. Even with a digitalized world, direct mail is particularly appealing – especially among Gen Z – who are traditionally accustomed to social media and online shopping. Recent data shows that 72% of the youngest customers look forward to discovering direct mail with surprise and at least 38% of those surveyed have even visited a particular website after receiving such mail.
While it is an important objective of the sales process, lead generation is also one of the most challenging. In fact, about 63% of leads take three months or so to convert, illustrating the lengthy efforts sales professionals have to undertake to nurture leads through the sales funnel.
This is additionally compounded by the following:
- Traditional methods aren’t sufficient when generating leads: about 97% of potential customers ignore cold calls, indicating phone outreach is becoming increasingly ineffective.
- Potential customers need more than a little nudge from sales professionals: about 96% of visitors to websites are not immediately ready to purchase, requiring more input from sales teams.
How Gifting Can Overcome this Challenge: A well-timed gift or direct mail campaign can act as a soft touchpoint that encourages a lead to engage further with a business. In these early stages of the cycle, gifting for sales prospecting can establish rapport and make a company stand out from the rest, which is particularly important in a market where differentiation is key.
Lead Qualification
This stage of the process is crucial to improve the overall effectiveness of the sales cycle and concentrate a sales team’s effort. But is it always that easy? The answer is: it can be.
An important step of the lead qualification stage is information gathering. Does the lead have the relevant qualities that align with the company’s target market and are they likely to convert into a paying customer? By providing insight into the potential customer’s pain points, sales professionals can influence their decision making and convert a prospect. The difficulty lies in an open line of communication. Just how willing are prospects to engage with a sales person?
Statistics reveal that about 40% of sales professionals find it difficult to engage prospects during the lead generation stage, particularly because prospects are unresponsive or lack the purchasing authority.
How Gifting Can Overcome this Challenge: A thoughtful gift can open the channels of communication, making leads more receptive to engage in deeper conversations about their challenges, preferences or needs. Moreover, corporate gifting acts as a personalized approach when addressing a lead, making a great first impression that can make a prospect feel valued from early on and accelerate their interest in further discussions.
A shareable gift link for a coffee can be used to entice a potential customer into meeting with a sales professional. Thoughtful and simple gifting for sales activities, such as these, can increase a lead’s willingness to openly communicate throughout the sales cycles.
Deal Closing
Is there anything more gratifying than closing deals for sales professionals? As almost an ode to their endeavors, the deal closing stage represents a culmination of the efforts of a sales team. Yet, while it may be pleasing, this juncture still requires a lot of work.
Personalization is often key when it comes to the make-or-break of sales. In a highly competitive market, buyers not only want personalization; they almost expect it – making a one-size-fit-all approach immaterial. In fact, approximately 53% of sales people understand the importance of personalizing the sales process to the prospect and its importance in the future. The deal closing stage can also be a lengthy process. Research shows it generally requires 5 to 10 touchpoints, or an average of 5 follow-up meetings, to successfully close a deal.
How Gifting Can Overcome this Challenge: Personalizing an approach when trying to close a deal can add an emotional connection to the business relationship. Where many touchpoints and follow-ups are required to close a deal, a thoughtful gift can decrease the likelihood of follow-up interaction and humanize the sales process, ultimately swaying the decision of a potential customer.
Post – Sales Actions
After a deal is closed or a sale is made, the relationship between a customer and business does not simply end. It, in fact, rather transitions into an opportunity for further value creation and engagement. After all, repeat customers is what makes a business thrive. Growing a brand requires a proactive approach by sales professionals to optimize post sales actions to build satisfied customers and have them recommend the company to others. Research indicates that referred customers are typically 16% more profitable, have a higher lifetime value and experience a lower churn rate of 18% when compared to non-referred customers.
How Gifting Can Overcome this Challenge: Referrals can be difficult to obtain if not done correctly. Using an incentive or gifting for sales activities to entice a customer into referring your business is often a solid strategy. Sending out a customized email gift invite, which sends a gift to a recipient for a successful referral, can help businesses grow their customer base and brand presence.
Let Giftsenda Help
Corporate gifting works best when the gifts are personalized, culturally appropriate, and aligned with the recipient’s preferences. The key is to ensure the gift reflects the company’s brand values while making the recipient feel genuinely appreciated at the same time. This is where a corporate gifting platform, like Giftsenda, can step in.
With over 20 years of expertise in the industry, Giftsenda’s approach to gifting is not only concentrated on transactional value, but rather on creating a human touchpoint and connection with brand and recipient – for this is the key to fostering lasting professional relationships. Using gifting for sales activities can humanize the sales process and help teams build rapport at every phase of the funnel.
