As a child, you often hear your parents speak about the “golden rule,” treat others the way you want to be treated. However, as an adult in the post-digital world, companies should be focused on treating customers the way they want to be treated. With brands like Netflix, Amazon, and Uber, offering highly personalized experiences, consumers expect the same treatment from all business transactions – even B2B interactions.

Today, businesses have access to data, insights, and technology to ensure every sales interaction is custom designed with the buyer in mind. By creating tailored interactions that meet a buyer’s personal preferences, interests, and behaviors, companies are seeing increases in revenue by up to 60 percent and accelerating deal velocity by up to 43 percent. However, many companies still fail to lead sales engagements that effectively communicate their brands’ value propositions in a way that their buyers will care. Why?

While the sales enablement technology you have plays a role in your sellers’ success, if it doesn’t provide options or opportunities for customization, is it really worth it? Your sales application should present a unique sales experience that is truly special to your brand and can be customized for each buyer.

Honing in on the ultimate sales experience

When looking for sales enablement technology, many companies look for tools that “check the boxes” on features and functions that they think sellers might need. Unfortunately, when buying sales enablement technology in this fashion companies will only see incremental improvement at best or just another failed application that the sales team refuses to use.

If you could create the ultimate sales experience what would it look like? Ask yourself the following questions to help you understand what the ideal sales experience looks like.

  • What story do you want your sellers to leverage as the basis of every meeting?
  • What interactive sales tools could you deploy to help your sellers showcase the business impact of your solution and pivot in the moment to meet the specific needs of each buyer?
  • What does the follow-up experience look like for the buyer?
  • What insights do you need to identify what is working (and not working), so that you can adjust?

Create Your Own Application

If you were a tech-enabled, consumer-facing company, creating your own application is simple. Ensure that the application is designed for Google Play and the Apple App Store and delivers your desired experience. Why should this be any different for B2B companies? Building your own custom sales application does require a lot more money and resources than purchasing a solution out-of-the-box. However, you don’t have to build a custom sales application form the ground up. By using a sales enablement platform, companies can easily (and for less money) build a custom sales experience. How?

SaaS sales enablement platforms provide a combination of a configurable, out-of-the-box solution full of features you know exist in the market, but don’t necessarily need and a fully custom sales application that addresses all your business challenges and achieves a greater customer experience. In having a flexible platform, users can create a fully custom experience by adding virtually unlimited advanced functionality and integrations that currently don’t exist.

A perfect example of a SaaS platform that you may already be doing this with is Salesforce CRM. While 90 percent of the platform will work for you out of the box, or through their AppExchange, the platform also offers flexibility and allows users to build custom pieces without breaking the bank.

Finding the right provider

The ultimate value of a sales application lies in its ability to impact the live engagement between a buyer and seller to drive more sales. Out-of-the-box sales enablement solutions will always fall short to a custom sales application platform. However, finding a provider that can give you the best of both worlds will provide your sellers with the tools they need to sell without any constraints and deliver a personalized, unforgettable experience.