Recently, Macro President & Founder Dan Radu was invited to Christian Klepp’s B2B Marketers on a Mission podcast to discuss how B2B companies can successfully scale customer experience (CX) by avoiding the usual pitfalls.
The episode is available to listen to but read on to get the highlights of the discussion!
How can a company scale with good customer experience?
Scaling means growing a business sustainably and efficiently, using the right technology and resources.
During this process, different strategies and techniques are required at every stage to accelerate the sales cycle by ensuring that the tools have the same data, that they track the same interaction, interest, product, or service that the customers are looking for.
Common mistakes and misconceptions
You have to know what marketing tactics are required for each stage of the sales and how you can reproduce them for different product lines or business units.
- A lot of customers want to do a lot of research before they even approach the seller. A lot of marketing can be automated in this case to help them during this process.
- It’s easy to become a slave to your own tools. These should only provide some functionality to help you live your life better, or run a better business process.
- Some companies are wasting too much time and money on managing or troubleshooting tools or integrations, and figuring out making decisions based on bad data.
Leveraging this digital technology to improve CX
There are dedicated teams in many organizations to review and test strategies and tools. But can they afford to spend half a year testing it in vacuum before you even use it?
Usually, directors, managers or even people in charge of technology will look at Gartner or Forrester studies, or maybe at specific cases, to see how certain vendors are categorized. Then they’ll try to understand what’s the right solution, which products they should buy to support their business, how they can achieve better business outcomes.
But at the end of the day, we need to ask ourselves:
- How’s it going to impact the customer?
- Is it going to make their experience better? Or harder?
For instance, let’s think about our experience with chatbots.
- How useful did you find those?
- Don’t you just want to speak to a real person?
Can companies do more with less?
We have seen a lot of companies hiring or laying off people. In this case we can add resources, we can work in partnership with our clients to add resources to their accelerated projects, or just be an extension of their team.
Remember, we want to be a digital marketing partner with global resources. So the challenges we are tackling often have to do with the following:
- Not enough resources,
- Not enough time, and
- Not enough people.
And we want to ask ourselves the following questions:
- Are you operating with the right MarTach?
- Do you need to bridge a cross-team or a tech implementation gap?
- Is the go-to-market strategy the right one?
- Are you adding real value to your partnership with your clients?
How to to effectively enhance CX with digital technology
You have to think about all business functions as a part of CX, not only Sales:
- Marketing as an extension of Sales,
- The delivery, and
- The customer support experience.
You have to make sure that they all work together, that all functions are aligned, that they have the same objectives, that they support the interests of the client, and that they're focused on revenue.
Sales and Marketing alignment
In many companies, there is no proper feedback loop between marketing and sales, situation whose starting points might be one of the following:
- The marketing and the sales goals are not aligned,
- The ideal customer profile is different for the members of the two teams,
- There is no shared revenue target,
- The two teams use different MarTech,
- There is a significant budget difference, and/or
- There is a notable type of leadership.
And so, Marketing and Sales should regularly meet to avoid situations like these:
- Sales would like to run a specific campaign that Marketing just doesn’t support,
- Challenges to manage a uniform message, audience and subscription preferences, or
- Sales and Marketing don’t have the same objectives.
Actionable tips
Managers should understand what business function and what experience outcome they’d like to have at every stage and then which tool or technology will support that experience.
They need to ask themselves:
- What is the function that will create that experience?
- How does it all come together?
- What is the streamline approach there that you can manage?
Also, the main metric a B2B business should have is revenue. But managers should dig a bit deeper, to assess their organization’s efficiency as well.
Ask these questions:
- How do you measure success?
- What do you benchmark it against?
- Is measuring marketing qualified or sales qualified leads? Is that a real measurement?
- Do these metrics work for you? Or maybe you’re interested more in pipeline acceleration as opposed to just the number of MQLs generating?
All these things are very important! But if you follow the tips above, you are on the right path to leveraging your MarTech stack into an optimized customer experience.