Customer loyalty is a goal every business strives for. It’s so much easier to sell to the same customer again and again than it is to go out and find new customers every time. Establishing these long-lasting, reliable relationships is even more important in B2B. Loyalty, however, is increasingly hard to come by, with economic pressures leaving many businesses wondering if they shouldn’t consider their options and explore what other suppliers have to offer.

Even with these challenges, earning a customer’s loyalty isn’t impossible, but it’s not something you should start thinking about only after the sale. Loyalty is the end result of a long journey that begins the moment a potential customer discovers your business. Once you’re on their radar, the goal is to deliver a positive customer experience that doesn’t stop when you make the sale.

What does a loyalty-winning experience look like? First of all, loyalty is a two-way street. A relationship is about more than making a sale; it’s a commitment to mutual success. It’s also a street that is full of potholes and constantly in need of maintenance. The customer expects a smooth ride every time, not just their first time on their journey with you. One good interaction turns into another, but it doesn’t take many bumps in the road before that customer starts looking for another way to get where they’re going. Once you’ve made the sale, you haven’t reached the end of the road. That’s where the work of building an ongoing relationship begins. But first, you have to attract the kinds of customers who will want to be loyal to your kind of business.

Differentiation Brings the Right Customers

A business relationship is like any other relationship: the two entities involved have to be compatible. That’s why it’s so important to establish a clear identity for your business. If you want to attract compatible customers, that means understanding your unique selling point: the thing you do that no one else does, or the thing you do better than anyone else. If you know who you are and what you’re about, you’re better positioned to attract the kind of customers who get you and want to give you their business.

Personalization Builds Relationships

Today, personalization is more than adding the customer’s first name to an email salutation. Personalization happens at every step of the customer journey and it is, in part, the product of data analysis, bringing together everything from demographic information to browsing and shopping habits. When properly interpreted, this data gives your sales and marketing teams tools to reach the right customers in the right way.

When you break down the stages of the customer journey, you can identify customers’ pain points at every touchpoint. When the right customers can find you, when you give them the right information about the benefits of your products at the right times, when you can show them the benefits of your products, when you can make placing an order as pleasant an experience as possible, and when you provide customer support post-purchase, you’ve done what you need to do to earn customer loyalty. Mapping out the customer journey, which you can learn more about here, is how you get there.

Account-Based Marketing

In B2B or any sector where annual contract value is high and relative number of opportunities in your market are low, account-based marketing (ABM) provides a highly personalized marketing practice that aligns sales and marketing around ideal customer profiles, customer journey maps, and data-driven insights. With an ABM strategy, sales and marketing will work closely to develop personalized marketing campaigns and sales playbooks that qualify and convert leads. For more about ABM, check out this blog.

A Customer Relationship Management System Brings It All Together

The more your business grows, the more difficult it becomes to deliver a personalized experience to each one of them. As a platform for coordination and automation, a CRM makes delivering personalization at scale easy. The thing with automation, however, is that it shouldn’t seem automatic to the customer. With an ABM strategy and a CRM, you can segment your customer lists so that different kinds of customers, or leads at different stages at the customer journey, receive different marketing communications tailored to their specific needs. Learn more about how CRM can transform your business here.

What About the Experiences?

So far, this article has been all about personalization: understanding what makes your business different, finding the customers that are right for you, and developing marketing campaigns and sales playbooks that will build relationships. The customer experience itself will differ depending on what you’re selling and who you’re selling it to. What remains the same is how you deliver great experiences: you know who your customers are, what they want, and what makes it hard for them to get what they want. You provide a great experience by taking away as much of that pain as possible and showing, at each stage of the customer journey, that you’re about more than making a sale, that you’re always there with a helpful tip, some crucial education, an easy-to-navigate website or catalog, or whatever it is the customer needs to take the next step in their journey with you.

Loyalty Comes From Real Connection

When you’re one of many suppliers a retailer has to choose from, the best way to convince them to choose you is to demonstrate that you can give them something that no one else can. That means taking the time to get to know the customer and their needs. Providing a seamless, personalized experience from discovery to post-purchase support demonstrates your loyalty to the customer. More often than not, the customer will recognize this and reciprocate.