Building and maintaining customer relationships during an economic downturn is a tough nut to crack, and sales personalization is the key.

Sales is the greatest job on the planet when the economy is booming and everything is going well. But what about when economic challenges hit and your clients look to trim the fat on their expenses?

Forbes has said that the U.S. economy will likely face a downturn in 2023. With financial constraints across many verticals, it will no longer be easy to persuade clients to stay or onboard a new company. You will lose out if you cannot provide a value proposition and build an ongoing relationship that makes them want to stay with you.

We have a few more months to prepare for this, build relationships, and become your clients’ go-to person. How do you do that? Our answer is to focus on personalization and being timely and knowledgeable.

Driving Personalization

Personalization is the art of tailoring your pitch to meet your client’s needs, challenges, and goals while making them feel special and appreciated. Easier said than done, right? Wrong. If you do the proper research on your client and their vertical, you can find the right words, phrases, and pain point solutions to light your prospect’s fire.

According to a study by Dynamic Research, “The State of Personalization Maturity – Q4 2021,” 93% of companies globally believe in the value of personalization and understand its benefits to the larger business strategy, or have made it the core to their customer experience operations. This number reflects just how important it is to retire that “spray and pray” approach and focus on contacting prospects the right way with the correct information at your fingertips, at the right time.

Personalization starts with something as basic as addressing your target by name in an introductory email, referring to the company’s latest news, or congratulating them on an award, acquisition, or new funding round, for example. With more than 300 billion emails being sent per day in 2022, yours needs to be relevant to stand out.

While this sounds like a no-brainer, it can be time-consuming to scout the Internet for company news; and, in the high-pressure environment of sales, many just do not have time to do that.

This is where sales intelligence platforms such as Owler come into play. These platforms aggregate data about the company, including the name and LinkedIn details of the company’s CEO, revenue, employee count, funding rounds, news, acquisitions, and much more. They provide a single source of truth that can be the difference in your client onboarding process success.

A little aggregated knowledge delivered into your inbox or CRM can be that difference in your sales conversion success.

Our tips to personalization success

• Be timely – jump onto your phone when you see that company’s good news hit your inbox
• Be the friendly face with the answers and solutions
• Be honest; don’t be tempted to promise things you cannot deliver
• Ask questions; it’s OK to admit you don’t know everything
• Make your prospect feel important by understanding their business inside-out

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