Being more customer-centric is a concept that, on the surface, can seem silly. What company doesn’t revolve around its customers and the revenue they generate?
The answer, of course, is that many aren’t. Companies can be product-centric, instead focusing on what products they can get to market that customers may appreciate.
So, how do you nail down your focus on customer centricity … and lead its inception within your organization? You’re in the right place.
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Being customer-centric is asking the question, “how does this serve our customer(s)?” at the heart of everything you do, from product development to customer service to marketing.
You need two key documents to fuel this growth: Buyer Personas / an Ideal Customer Profile and a customer journey.
Buyer persona documents provide the details that drive customer centricity. When the content you produce delivers insights into the actual person you’re targeting, that is when you have genuinely put your customer first. You then increase the potential for achieving higher engagement and having your persona see you and your brand as a trusted thought leader.
Building out the stages for your customer’s buying journey is critical to understanding what your persona(s) need to know as they venture from becoming aware of your solution to eventual loyal customer advocates.
When you know what it takes to move your prospect from one stage to the next, everything you develop in marketing is done with more confidence and opportunity for personalization. You can anticipate what your buyer needs before they need it, putting you top of mind as a brand and the ‘go-to’ resource in your industry.
The more you focus on the customer, the more likely they'll buy from you!
It is that simple in concept, but it's challenging to do in practice. There are two ironies to this:
Sure, we all want and often say we are focused on the customer. But truthfully, most aren't nearly as close as they could (and should!) be ... and it leaves revenue opportunity on the table as customer demands continue to evolve:
Simply put, after working with 1,500+ medium and large-sized companies, we've noticed some trends!
Building internal buy-in is crucial to the success of anything, and it's no different here. To help, you'll need an on-point pitch to communicate the necessity (and value!) of being customer-centric throughout your company- from leadership on down.
Like so many things in marketing, if you can't explain what you're doing in 30 seconds, it doesn't exist. But even more, it needs to be a standard definition that everyone in your organization understands. This creates better alignment and ensures you're talking in the same language!
Here's an example:
"Everything we do begins with the customer, not with us and our products. By re-framing our focus through the lens of the customer, we can now create the connected experience our customers expect. The net gain? We attract more new customers who stay longer, buy more, and make shareholders happy."
Sample "elevator pitch" for becoming more customer-centric
Any / all goals you set will flow from this, so take some time and get it right. -you'll be reciting a version of it in meetings and to key stakeholders for a while!
Now, it's time to highlight who's taking responsibility. If these initiatives come from the CEO and your leadership team on-board, this will be far easier to accomplish and push through. (A RACI chart is handy for this, and you can find examples here)
The bigger your company, the more complex this will need to be. An example is in the image for your guidance.
This is one of the most important campaigns you'll ever create!
You'll also need to budget for this, but there's a right and a wrong way to do it:
The most important thing to know: Do not set customer centricity aside as a “line item” in your budget.
Line items are easily displaced, reallocated, and borrowed from. You want your customer centricity initiative to have power, not be an afterthought. Ultimately, this undermines its importance as an initiative. It will likely be seen as a pet project, and won’t be integrated into the company culture.
Budgeting for customer centricity is all about how you allocate your budget. Funding customer-centricity throughout your budget firmly affixes the customer-centric mindset within your entire marketing organization.
Creating a budget centered around this will prove that the entire company is behind the initiative. It drives it down to the tactics that enable it and assigns ownership throughout the journey to erase all doubts that customer-centricity is a critical organizational initiative.
Use these questions as a guide:
It also fends off potential budget clawbacks, as so many orgs do as the latter half of the fiscal year hits!
There's six key areas to focus on: Strategy, People, Process, Tech / Data, Customer Understanding, and Results. Here's a few things to know about each.
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This still focused internally, and requires some frank assessments by you. Some key questions to answer:
This pertains to anyone in marketing, who's aligned with marketing, and the organizational structure around marketing.
This is typically the first area that can be addressed, as marketing has more influence in this area.
If you don't have the right technology, you cannot fully embrace a true customer-focused approach! Ask:
I'll dive more into this in a later section - click here to jump to it now.
This really gets to the heart of your customer journey from initial engagement to post-purchase nurturing. Really, it gets to the core of the sales / marketing relationship and how well each works with the other on the entire customer lifecycle.
None of your marketing matters with measurable impact - and none of the impact matters unless you can trace it to revenue for the business. Focusing on repeatable, scalable, and predictable processes and outcomes only strengthens this area.
What is the one customer metric that equates to financial value?
This allows you to anchor reporting efforts around a central theme that will resonate with key stakeholders (and build more marketing credibility within your organization).
Let's take a look at two manufacturers and two ads: Knoll, and Herman Miller. Both firms must possess a customer-centric culture to produce furniture that is still desirable half a century after being built. How they approach describing it in these two videos (and the impact their content has) is quite different!
Throughout this video, Knoll misses opportunities to forge a deep connection with its audience. From the start, this video is clearly centered on Knoll.
Twenty-four seconds of black and white, wordless video centered on machines and manufacturing is promptly followed with the company standard of trotting out long-tenured employees to brag about their time with the firm. From there, we get into the list of manufacturing facilities and how large an operation Knoll has.
Knoll is proud of what it is!
1m24s: The first mention of the customer, the user, comes in the form of a single, generic sentence about the product being "incredibly focused on the individual user."
1m29s: Right back into back-patting about the quality of the manufacturing process. This goes on in various forms for almost 90 seconds.
1m50s: An excellent opportunity to position their testing procedures as a mechanism for delivering customer satisfaction, Knoll instead chooses to let their testing cycle numbers stand alone and stand a little bit too proud.
2m56s: Even when discussing the Customer Resources department, where the customer should be front and center, it becomes a statistical ego trip about how many orders the team is processing. And you think there's a light in the darkness when you hear, "We get very intimate with those," only to find the next word to be "orders." That's right; it's intimate about the order specs.
3m22s: The lead in by Carl Hohmann, SVP, Customer Resources, shows promise - "We really try to work with design firms, architectural firms, to get exactly what that firm wants." Unfortunately, a product plug for the Rep Profiles product immediately follows.
This is three little vignettes rolled into a single video. And admittedly, the title "About Herman Miller" signals you're about to go on a company-centric joyride... so when you first push play, it's not surprising that it feels like a standard corporate awards video.
Quickly, though, Herman Miller humbles itself with the self-deflating graphic depicting it as the smallest company to be honored with all three awards. They make their logo so minor that most brand standard bearers would never have allowed it. Their logo acts almost as a period to the five other firms!
And it's at this point the video isn't really about Herman Miller, but what Herman Miller does for those it serves.
The following narrative is about Herman Miller, but not its manufacturing or size. The narrative is about the culture and asks a question from the third-person perspective. This approach distances Herman Miller from the self-serving "we" language prevalent in these corporate propaganda videos. And it makes the audience open to discovery, and eager to explore what's coming next.
1m 29s: Though it takes Herman Miller a minute and a half to mention the customer – a full five seconds longer than Knoll – it never feels like that. The footage leading up to that customer reference is filled with people and products in use, with a narrative about solving real problems (interpreted as your problems).
From here on out, the video is laced with specific references to "you" and how that impacts Herman Miller's approach to its work. There are self-deprecating references to making mistakes and being told they're wrong by their designers.
2m 10s: They even show a customer map that places the customer dead in the center while a voiceover says, "we do them for a better world around you."
2m 30s: That first vignette closes, and the video immediately launches into a unique story in which the company introduces honey bees to eradicate paper wasps from their new production facility. As a result, these bees pollinated fields of beautiful flowers and produced enough honey that Herman Miller bottled it and gave the honey to guests.
While this has nothing to do with furniture, presumably, it isn't customer-centric; it's a beautiful sleight of hand.
This innovative, empathetic thinking is precisely why customers seek out a company like Herman Miller. It's a clear demonstration of walking the talk.
The unlikely bee and honey story follows with a segment on Herman Miller's production system. Contrasted to Knoll's, this segment frames all of Herman Miller's manufacturing process in terms of the customer. Namely, their work with Toyota gives customers greater flexibility and agility with their orders without sacrificing on-time delivery. Ken Goodson, EVP of Operations, states with conviction that "we modify our work plans to fit you."
This 6m 16s video concludes with a quick recap that Herman Miller exists to "build and design a better world around you." They even replace the Herman Miller logo in the iconic red circle with the word "you."
Again, I'm sure the brand watchdogs could have been more thrilled about that, but it plays well with customers!
Considering the enduring products both firms have created, Knoll and Herman Miller are manufacturers with customer-centricity within their organizations. But these videos do not tell that story. Unfortunately, the Knoll piece is a company-centric video that has become the standard in manufacturing, with way too much emphasis on production. Herman Miller’s illustrates a firm that takes on the perspective of their customers and cares so much about that perspective that they made a video with that perspective in mind.
Ultimately, though, when it comes down to it, the biggest difference is that the Knoll video screams at the customer, “LOOK AT ME,” while the Herman Miller story confidently states, “We see YOU.”
When I evaluate a marketing operation, I begin with its charter, a set of guiding principles, or the reason they come to work every day. For the company in this example, the team charter and company charter are well-aligned:
What's interesting here is there needs to be a marketing operations team.
Additionally, this structure reports to the acting COO. This is an ongoing trend: Once sales and marketing ops combine and even include other parts of the organization (such as in a RevOps model), reporting to the COO starts to make sense.
This org structure was driven by the desire of the CEO to create a single view of the customer and to fully pivot away from a product focus to a customer focus. Let's look at each aspect of the org chart.
Note that the team's name is not marketing operations; it's Business Enablement (BE).
The purpose of the name is to denote more of an action orientation — toward enabling customer-facing employees with technology, process, and people. The role of the combined team is to create a horizontal view and align all functions for a cohesive customer experience.
The org chart can be viewed as a wheel with a center and a set of spokes. The Business Enablement team is the center spoke, and they work with all areas of the business to deliver the customer experience. The BE team manages much crossover as it acts as the primary communication vehicle around all things related to the customer journey.
The BE team manages anything that might touch the customer — either a prospect moving to become a new customer or a current customer. The BE group drives approvals, help, optimizations, and communications around any customer touchpoints.
The leader of the BE team is charged with creating an optimal customer experience through the application of technology, process, data, and oversight. In order to most effectively mine and share relevant and objective customer insights, the Analyst role reports directly to the Director.
The Analyst is responsible for reviewing, analyzing and creating actionable insights for sales, for customer success and for marketing. These customer insights are also shared with the executive team with the goal of improving decision-making. Having the Analyst role live outside the vertical functions ensures data analysis objectivity that leads to better decisions for the business.
Reporting to the head of BE are three managers, one for each vertical: sales ops, customer success ops, and marketing ops. These managers support sales, customer success, and marketing. Each vertical manager has similar responsibilities: technology, training, messaging, and support.
For technology, each manager is responsible for all aspects of the technology required to support the vertical, from sourcing, implementing, optimizing, and supporting vendor management. Respective verticals aren't responsible for data analysis as that function resides in the Analyst role. Analysts are responsible for the state of the data.
Managers do not make technology decisions in a silo but evaluate technology across all verticals. If marketing ops needs a particular kind of technology, there are considerations to make in the process.
Here are vital questions to be answered:
Interestingly, BE in this company does not manage the data map; it's managed by marketing! The BE team occasionally steps in to help optimize certain areas, and the BE team (the Analyst) is responsible for data analysis.
In addition, a key role in the technology and support functions is a dedicated tech support person who provides day-to-day assistance. Half the battle with mastering any technology is getting people to use it; the other half is getting them to use it effectively.
A dedicated person who can empathize with the users ensures systems are optimally used, and ROI is gained. This is a unique role that I have not seen in many companies. As the MO capability grows across functions and the number of technologies continues to grow, having a dedicated training and support person is key. Of course, training is fundamental to this process.
The odd function for each vertical is messaging. While it may seem strange initially, it makes sense in a customer-centric organization. The verticals and marketing work to ensure messaging and content are optimized for the customer experience across all functions. They also work to ensure consistent use of messaging and content. This way, no matter what part of the company a customer interacts with, consistency and thought are given to optimizing each touch point for the customer and the company.
Everything we know about doing it right came from Steve Jobs at Apple. Steve Jobs said, “You’ve got to start with the experience and work back toward the technology, not the other way around.” Take this as a guiding principle when you look at operationalizing your MarTech stack for customer centricity.
For example, here’s a picture of a typical MarTech stack:
This is a typical picture for most companies. It’s useful, but it is clearly product focused – not customer focused.
One of the most exciting things about where we are in marketing operations today is that you are in a position to take a leadership role in your company. You can lead customer centricity in your company by re-visualizing your MarTech stack.
Here’s a future state version of a MarTech stack with the customer as the central focus instead of the product:
As you can see, the customer journey (the infinity loop in the center) takes center stage. The tech is then aligned around the customer journey. Each piece of technology has a purpose related to customer centricity.
Marketing Operations can show the company how technology relates to the customer journey. You’re not just buying tech for point solutions anymore. You’re buying tech that specific relates to solving customer problems.
In order to know where you need to go, you first need to understand where you are. This is where the Marketing Operations Maturity Model comes into play.
In the Efficient stage of the model, marketing operations still needs to be a dedicated function. There are still silos in marketing, there is no customer journey, and MarTech is focused on point solutions.
In the Effective stage, marketing operations has become a dedicated function. There is cohesion in marketing, but there still needs to be a customer journey.
Customer insights exist, but marketing is still focused on customer acquisition and the tech stack still concentrated on point solutions.
The marketing operations function has become strategic in the customer-centric stage of the Marketing Operations Maturity Model. It is a dedicated and cross-functional team. There is a customer journey, and that journey impacts everyday decisions. Customer insights help for all functions.
MarTech gets adopted when it meets defined customer needs instead of one-off solutions, and everything ties to the company initiative, which is customer-centricity.
Your MarTech stack has been restructured around a customer focus in the next-generation stage. Marketing operations is a dedicated/restructured function and cross-functional.
If your CEO is serious about the shift to customer centricity, one of the best things you can do is put together a customer centricity council. Draft your future MarTech state based on the customer categories that arise from your customer journey map.
Then, inventory everything in your current stack ... and build the business case with leadership's blessing.
Want more? I did a webinar specifically on your tech stack and how it relates to be a customer-focused company:
I’ve had the opportunity to work with this company over the last 18 months. They began with a desire to focus more on the customer, so their first org chart was a combination of marketing ops and sales ops.
This was a significant first step, but to fully embrace a focus on the customer, they had to go further.
That step was adding customer support, setting up the BE team as the source of truth around the customer, and adding the Analyst role as a direct report — not in a vertical, but to the head of the BE team. For many companies, breaking down traditional silos like this may be almost impossible. Yet, it guarantees a better customer experience and better business results.
The B2B customer is looking for the B2C experience in all interactions with your company. Someone has to call the shots to create a cohesive experience. In this company I worked with, it’s the Business Enablement team.
That's a lot, and it can be hard to remember it all. So ... how about taking action right now?
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