Pick your best product / service. Now, put yourself in your customer's shoes: How easy it is to get what they need from you?
That customer experience will make or break the sale ... or the decision to even engage with sales in the first place.
From providing answers to Google queries to sending emails they actually want to open, every touchpoint matters. And if just one falls down, you've opened the door for your competition to score a closed-won opportunity at your expense.
So, how do you build a world-class customer experience? Let's get started:
Click to jump to a section: Who's In The Room? | Statistics | A Bad Example | What Good Looks Like | Get Started
If your answer is "marketing" then you'll be wasting a lot of time!
Anyone who interacts with customers (sales, marketing, customer service, etc.) .... and any team that indirectly supports a customer's experience (think IT or finance, for example) should have a voice in the process.
As Alan Gonsenhauser says, "The CMO should help the CEO and functional peers create and continuously improve enterprise customer focus ... Ultimately, it’s the CEO’s responsibility to provide the leadership, culture, and autonomy to drive a customer-centric enterprise. He or she can delegate that responsibility to the CMO or another leader to be the key customer evangelist, but must fully support the process."
This is a cross-functional ordeal that requires top-down support. Anything less is only setting you up to fail!
This can feel like a shift in culture ... because it is. And you, as a marketer, can lead this change.
In fact, one could argue this is a fully transformative effort - and yes, you should read that linked blog right now, then come back here to continue.
You can read 100+ more in our list of customer experience statistics, but here are a few key ones to have in any slide deck, ready to use:
What happens when a customer relationship develops poorly? Let’s take a look:
Company X - let’s call them Acme – has been marketing and selling the same way for a long time, and it’s been working well. They are the "800-pound gorilla" in their space. Half of their customers are legacy, and net-new business comes from referrals and brand-building activities like events.
They owned their market and business was strong...
...until competitors built disruptive platforms and started delivering high-touch service that's simply better than what Acme currently offers. Acme's customers start to leave them in favor of the quicker, more streamlined service they are getting from the competition.
As Acme’s Sales team loses more and more deals, they press Marketing for more (and better) leads. Marketing feels Sales is too old-school and mishandles the leads. Finger pointing and blame-throwing ensue... and the customer is lost in the middle.
Acme always focused its marketing and sales efforts around a traditional lead funnel.
Naturally, Marketing is pressured to make it rain and big campaigns are planned. But like many companies, Acme doesn’t have a clue as to what's needed to really engage customers and prospects across the buying journey. In addition, they can't measure campaign effectiveness, which leaves much to be desired for return on investment discussions and hampers Marketing's ability to demonstrate bottom-line impact.
Funnel results, in Acme's case, are the metric - but it only looks at the internal perspective.
Acme failed to deliver experiences its customers now expect.
Instead of delivering relevant information at the appropriate time, Acme:
Acme has failed to understand what the customer truly wants. They've modeled marketing and sales processes around what they consider to be a funnel.
Related: Build a chatbot that doesn't suck
We all regularly engage with companies that have gotten too comfortable as leaders in their industries. Think Telecom and Transportation, for example:
We could name many examples, but the lesson is clear – no industry leader is safe from disruption.
This is tough news for brands that have never had to build win-win customer relationships or design customer experiences that anticipate prospects’ evolving needs.
Even the biggest brands would be well-served to take a fresh look around if they want to increase profitability in the ensuing months and years!
Getting customer-focused can be enormously difficult:
All customer touchpoints become orchestrated.
Here at The Pedowitz Group, we believe this is integral to adopting scalable and sustainable revenue marketing throughout your enterprise that earns marketing as much (if not more) respect throughout the company as engineering, product, or sales.
While a customer's buying journey can differ significantly across different industries (finance vs. manufacturing vs. pharmaceutical, for example) ... some core concepts remain constant for B2B buyers.
Here are three steps to developing your CX strategy:
Companies like Acme, our woeful protagonist in the previous section, must refocus their efforts on the long-term versus the immediate sales need.
"But that doesn't help my numbers now" ... I hear it being shouted from the mountains already!
To be honest, you can do both (and you'll have to if you want necessary buy-in). Here's how, and make sure to dive more in-depth into this area in our customer journey mapping post.
HubSpot’s definition of a buyer persona still holds true: A buyer persona is a semi-fictional representation of your ideal customer based on market research and real data about your existing customers. The greater the detail, the more rounded your persona becomes.
I like to think of this process as creating a real 360-degree person that represents an essential segment of your buying center
There are some fundamental steps that need to be considered when developing a buyer persona.
If possible, reach out to a few of your current customers and gather information from their perspective. The following is critical intel that drives future marketing strategy and ideation:
Along with actual customers, reach out to key members of your organization to interview as well. Get a representation of all customer-facing departments such as sales, product development, and customer service.
Understanding how each of these areas interacts with your customer is also critical to building out a persona that encompasses the entire customer journey.
From your customer and stakeholder interviews, it should become more clear who all is involved when it comes to purchasing your products/services. Depending on the complexity of the sale, multiple individuals may have to be consulted before a company can actually sign on the dotted line.
Along with the actual decision-maker, there are champions, influencers, as well as users and technical representatives that my need to be consulted. These individuals make up a buying center and understanding all of the significant players will ensure marketing is more strategic and personalized.
The greater the detail on areas such as demographics, behavior patterns, motivations, triggers, goals, pain points, information consumption, social and professional network, and influencers (to name a few!), the more well-rounded your personas will be.
All of these details play a role in how marketing is designed for a given persona. For example: knowing what industry associations and publications your persona is connected to could open up additional outreach opportunities that are very specific and segmented.
Once you have your set of buyer personas, now it’s time to align them to your customer journey. Here at TPG, we use The Loop customer journey model that encompasses the customer acquisition and expansion stages:
Did you notice how Acme's problem, in our previous example, was not just net-new acquisition ... but also customer retention? They're equally important to growing the business and each process feeds into the other - thus, The Loop!
Aligning to this process requires many of those same stakeholders that you interviewed in your organization to participate. If you want to truly understand what your buyers need or are seeking at each stage of the journey, you will need representatives from all customer-facing areas to weigh in and share insights.
Related: Our lead management consulting services make this happen!
To understand how your customers buys, you need to get inside their head, take a walk in their shoes. Consider coming at this from three different angles:
The idea is to create a list of multiple questions for each of your personas that align with every stage of the customer journey. Then, as you get ready to work on your content strategy, the answers to these questions will help you define ideas that will serve your buyer personas. Remember, you are the customer - word the questions as if you are asking as a customer yourself!
The confidence from knowing what your personas need at every stage of the customer journey will allow you to meet them where they are, whether they are just becoming aware they have a problem or at the stage of evaluating options for a solution.
Now that you have an explosion of questions at each stage of ther journey, you need to begin to become the guide for your customer and provide answers. Your content should do exactly that.
Providing content for every stage allows you to get closer to putting the right message in front of the right person at the right time. What question(s) in a given stage is someone trying to answer ... and do you have an article, video, PDF, etc. to give them that answers those pain points?
Now you have your personas, the typical path(s) they take when interacting with your business, and probably a good idea of what your best content is. It's time to put the puzzle pieces together!
For each buying stage, determine what content fits best. An explainer blog may be better for "Unaware" vs. a low-value gated PDF for "Consideration" vs. an interactive assessment for "Decision" on the left side of the loop.
On the right side, keep in mind you are targeting current (or recent) customers. What are they interested in two weeks and two months after their initial purchase with you? Are there related topics you can speak to?
Mapping this out provides two key items:
Note you can have multiple pieces of content for a given stage - they may provide different insights into a similar problem, or a user may respond better to one vs. another. Don't force it into a stage it shouldn't be!
Map this out for each key product line / service offering (you'll want to pick 1-2 to start with to figure out what works best for you), and then you're ready to move onto the final step.
Congratulations! You have all the tools you need to get tactical. So, let's talk distribution.
This isn't just digital advertising, but it covers your email nurtures, outbound sales calls, social selling... any potential touchpoint!
Split your touch points into two areas: acquisition and expansion. Consider these factors when deciding your channels and interaction for how a customer will interact with your business:
Knowing what channels it makes sense to leverage, and for which stages, will create a more scalable model for marketing to operate with.
Related: Develop your own multi-channel strategy with our team!
Marketing doesn't need to monitor every single datapoint available, but having the right KPIs allows you to build a concise, relevant story showing marketing's successes and how they tie to revenue objectives.
Expert tip: A rookie mistake we see over and over again with KPIs is trying to measure too many things at once. Focus on a small set of KPIs, optimize and then move on. In addition, remember that not all metrics are created equal, some are meant for the boardroom, and some should stay with your team for operational decision making.
Here's some examples for stage / good metrics, but you may have others that are valued within your organization:
| Stage | Metric |
| Unaware | Impressions, Site Visits, Organic Ranks |
| Aware | Pages / Session, Videos Watched, Emails Sent |
| Consideration | Low-Value Asset Downloads, Emails Clicks |
| Evaluation | High-Value Asset Downloads, |
| Decision | Calls Booked, SQLs |
| Onboarding | Completion Rate, Time To Engagement Start |
| Adoption | Number Of Active Users, Feature Usage |
| Value Realization | Decision-Maker Engagement (Content Read, # Of Conversations, etc.) |
| Loyalty | Retention Rate, Average Renewal Value, Client Case Studies |
| Advocacy | Client Referrals, Member Of Customer Advisory Board, Google Reviews |
Personas, customer journeys, content, distribution...there is a lot to consider when trying to create the optimal customer experience. As you push for greater marketing impact on revenue, tactics absolutely matter ... but without an overall focus on the customer's wants (and knowing what they are), you'll get nowhere fast.
If you nail the experience time and again, they will purchase, buy more, renew, and even advocate… a win-win relationship.
So, how do you begin taking what you have and making it even better?
