Talk to your customers about their feelings. Your sales will climb.

If you are a sales-driven organization chances are you think a lot about revenue. And while your sales team may be all about numbers, your marketing team needs to be all about feelings—your audiences’ feelings.

Sixty-five percent of customers are lost because of indifference, not because of mistakes.

How do you find out how your customers are feeling? Ask them.

When you understand your customers’ pain points, you are better prepared to engage with them. This is certainly true for the sales team, but equally true for the marketing team.

Here are a few ways to find out how your customers are feeling:

1. Ask your frontline sales team.

They talk with customers regularly. Create a list of questions that will help you unearth customer pain points. Ask them if your product or organization addresses them adequately.

2. Appoint a customer advisory group and hold quarterly meetings.

Make sure you appoint honest and loyal customers who will tell you the truth and not what they think you want to hear.  Ask your advisory group to contribute to the discussion topics.

3. Send out a short customer survey to a small group of customers via email.

Be sure to reward those who participate. Your questions should be short and relevant to the customer experience. Remember your customer is the expert on your customer experience.

Once you understand your clients’ pain points and how they are feeling, you are in a good position to increase your relevance to them. This knowledge will help you improve the quality of the experiences your customers have with your brand, products, marketing messages and service delivery.

When brand, marketing and customer service messages align with how audiences are feeling about you, you demonstrate that you are listening and have a product or service that is designed to meet their needs.

According to HubSpot, here are the top ways to create a positive customer experience for buyers:

• Listen to customer needs (69%)
• Don’t push your agenda (61%)
• Provide a relevant service, product or information (61%)
• Respond to customer needs in a timely manner (51%)

Customers want information to help them move through the sales funnel. That’s good news. So, if we listen to our customers’ pain points we can get them to the bottom of the funnel faster, create loyal customers and motivate referrals.