Have you noticed that your marketing seems to be doing a great job of pulling customers in and that your sales team is able to land those customers, but customers are quickly leaving your company afterward? It is time to examine your marketing and sales tactics to see why customer retention is suffering.
Here are three of the key ways that marketing and sales strategies can end up driving customers away from your company.
1. False Promises
If your marketing and sales team are not in good touch with customer service or what your company really has to offer, sales may be made but you may find that it is difficult to keep those customers around for long. Your marketing and sales team may make promises in hopes of landing a customer, but customer service may not be able to deliver on those promises.
Customers may leave with a negative impression of your business if they believe they were guaranteed something that they didn’t get. It is absolutely essential that your marketing and sales team know exactly what your company really has to offer to customers so that they don’t promise something that is difficult or impossible to deliver on.
2. Unclear Next Steps
Say your marketing indicates that a potential customer need only fill out a contact form or send in their email in order to begin the process of onboarding with your company. It is extremely important that once the potential customer takes this step, sales is prompt in following through on it.
If your customer has to wait around for even a week or so after taking the step that marketing told them to take, they may start to rethink whether they really want to sign up for what your business has to offer after all.
3. Limitations in Fine Print
Nobody likes fine print. If your marketing team is advertising something to a potential customer but the customer later finds out that there are restrictions or parameters on that advertised benefit that were not made clear to them at the beginning, they may be very frustrated with your business.
The customer may walk away, irritated that they have invested time and effort into taking the steps they have already taken. They may be vocal about their frustrations with your company, discouraging other prospective clients from signing on with you.
How to Prevent Marketing and Sales From Hurting Customer Retention
The best way to prevent any of these potential issues from driving customers away is to have superb communication between your marketing, sales, and customer service teams. Make sure that every step of a customer’s experience is consistent and free of unpleasant surprises.
Open up lines of communication between your departments so that they can discuss their experience in recruiting customers, selling to them, and working with them once they sign on. Make sure that your onboarding procedures for all teams also include presentations about how the other departments work so that it is clear from the beginning exactly what the customer should experience from the beginning of the sales process all the way through to being a customer.
