When your business is in its infancy, every decision you make matters. From early communications with customers to building your website, it pays to focus on the details, such as customer behavior. These customer behaviors can inform strategies and streamline decision making throughout the life of your company, although they can be difficult to track without the help of certain tools like a sales dashboard or CRM such as Salesforce.

Customer Behavior During the Proof of Concept Phase

After an idea for a great business is born, your young company goes through a proof of concept phase, where your ideas, products, and involvement with the general public is tested for the first time. During this critical stage, first impressions are made of your company, which is why listening to what people have to say is so essential.

As you start building your website, selling products to the public, and focusing on your branding, you might hear more than one opinion about how you are doing, but it isn’t always easy to listen. Since your business is your baby, opinions about products or criticisms of your processes can be difficult to evaluate objectively, since you may already feel like you doing everything you can to shape your young company. However, customer behavior is one of the most telling aspects of business success, and early interactions can help you to pave the way for future growth.

What Customer Behavior Can Tell You

Customer behavior can help inform strategies across your company, help you understand what your weak points are, and even help you identify trends so you can make the most out of the wins. Below, we’ll look at some specific examples of customer behavior and how you can use it.

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Lead Acquisition

Learning how your clients happen upon your website is crucial for building your business, especially if you offer a free trial or freemium version of your product. By using tracking URLS and distributing them to different online clients, you can quickly and easily see where you are gaining most of your new clients. Before you pay for online advertising, think carefully about your client’s need, the solution you offer, and where clients would most likely be online when searching for a company like yours.

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Personalize Sales Pitches

When you know how your customers are using your website, you can craft targeted sales pitches that are more effective for your clients. For instance, if you run a baking supply store and you notice that most of your clients are repeat customers who own bakeries of their own, you could have your sales team focus on brick and mortar bakeries in your area to drum up new business and direct more traffic to your website.

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Online Shopping Habits

What are your customers buying online, and what was their path to the cart? By paying attention to metrics about how much time clients are spending online, what they are adding to their wish lists, which promo codes they use, and how much they are spending on average, you can learn how to cater towards future customers. Looking at average bounce rates can also help you to determine which pages aren’t functioning properly, or may not be the easiest to use.

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Customer Retention

By creating the ability for customers to create an account with your business website, you can make it easy to track ongoing customer retention and repeat business. To encourage loyalty to your business, you may even decide to offer complimentary promo codes to repeat clients. 

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Effective Ways to Track Consumer Behavior

Using a sales dashboard you can track customer behavior closely. A powerful business intelligence tool can tell you how customers are responding to your offerings in near real-time, helping you learn more about those patronizing your business and shaping future interactions with them.

A sales dashboard allows you to track a variety of KPIs that can alert you to trends within your business. KPIs specifically relating to the proof of concept phase for a product can aid you in predicting future performance.  

While tracking customer behavior is essential during your company’s proof of concept phase, there are so many different metrics to look at, it isn’t always easy to manage the information. Here are some of the most common ways businesses track consumer behavior, and which methods have been shown to be especially effective.

CRM Software

Customer Relationship Management Software, or CRM for short, is designed to help companies track everything from customer data and online interactions to sales numbers, lead conversions, contract creation, marketing efforts, customer support statistics, and even employee customer service. While there are multiple CRM software programs on the market, some business intelligence services, like Grow, link to CRMs like Salesforce to pool and analyze  data in a clear, relatable, and usable way.

By coupling a CRM software such as Salesforce, and business intelligence dashboards from Grow, you can evaluate everything from Google Analytics and marketing automation tools to answer complex questions about sales leads, customers, and client behavior. For instance, by using custom sales dashboards from Grow, the company Sococo, an online team management business, was able to analyze the source of their leads, evaluate different issues those clients were having, and then shape their sales tactics to improve their growth.

Google Analytics

By using Google Analytics, you can easily see which country most of your traffic is coming from, where those leads were generated, and which keywords spawned the search. However, tracking Google analytics is time consuming without a CRM, especially if you don’t have experience using the built-in software.

Social Media

Social media can be a powerful tool in tracking customer behavior, since customers can interact with your page, find leads to your website, and even write reviews about your company. Unfortunately, because social media is an incredibly public forum, it also opens your company up for issues like false reviews, negative comments, and uncomplimentary photos. If you use social media to track customer behavior, keep a close eye on your page to weed out any potential issues.

Your customers are telling you everything you need to know in order to keep growing, whether it be that they want to see more of you on Instagram instead of Facebook, or want you to do some more leg work before reaching out to them for a sales pitch. By tracking these behaviors closely, whether siloed in tools or using a sales dashboard, you will ensure your future growth and long-term success.