Successful companies have an intimate knowledge of their customers and the customer’s challenges. They also know how to treat them right.
Whether you are a start-up or trying to scale your business, your most important objective is to know what problem your customers are trying to solve. A great idea without a customer need does not make a business.
As you scale up the business, you need to continually shore up relationships and ensure great experiences with the goal of retaining the customer’s business, protecting yourselves from competitive threats or changing market forces, and looking for growth in up-sell and cross-sell opportunities.
So as marketers, let’s resolve to do a few things to help our companies win.
One: Talk to Your Customers
If you have not made this a regular practice, it’s time to get out of the cubicle (or get on Zoom) and meet customers one-on-one. Nothing is so invigorating as talking to them about their challenges, their pain points, their decision trigger points and their collaborators in defining solutions. It brings all the guess work and theoretical postulating down to earth.
The chief challenge for marketers is to understand the customer as deeply as possible to create genuine, “needs-based” messages and content, and know where to connect with them. And yes, you can learn much from industry analysts and your sales team, but don’t rely on intermediaries. Only when you hear them talk, do you understand the language and the nuances of customer conversations.
In my own experience, writing customer case studies and helping customers deliver presentations at our events opened my eyes up and helped develop more effective campaigns. When you can ask, “Do you mean …?” or “Would you say …?” and you hear them correct you with “No, it’s like this …”. Plus, you gain a better understanding of the dynamics of buying teams, e.g., who makes and influences what decisions, and how many layers of decision making are required to make a purchase.
Action: Conduct an in-person or virtual customer tour. If you have a specific purpose, such as developing references or success stories, great. But do the tour, nonetheless.
Two: Identify your customers global challenges
So, everyone has been talking about a coming recession (since how many years ago), energy prices are still high, supply chains have returned to normal, the future of hybrid work is still a question, regional wars, de-globalization, extreme weather events, etc. Is there enough to worry about?
If you’re thinking about these challenges and how they affect your business, you can bet that your customers are thinking about them, too. Wouldn’t it be relevant to acknowledge them in your content and communications? It helps convey that you feel their pain.
As Iearned my stripes in the technology business, I often worked with themes like doing more with less, reducing costs and helping the customer be successful with their customers.
Action: Survey customers about the forces are creating challenges in their business. Make this part of your “know your customer” tour. Then make an internal report to inform your customer facing colleagues and the execs about how the customer view disruptions in their business.
And, if you find it insightful, turn it into content for your prospects and customers. They always want to hear what their peers are up to.
Three: Be kind to your customers
This is a nice way of saying provide them a great experience. Surveys on customer experience regularly show that companies do not nearly meet customer expectations. So, who’s going to fix it?
Marketing needs to take responsibility for customer experience. The first order of business is to determine your company’s skills gap. Do you need digital experience and user interface experts? Do you need better analysis of customer interactions? Is it the technology behind customer facing applications?
When my marketing team was developing a customer advocacy program for a company whose mission was to lead in customer experience, we got an ear full. “Yes, I like the product, but do you know what I had to go through …?”
Action: Create a cross-functional customer experience team. Ensure that the team has executive support. Conduct a skills gap analysis on key roles and systems that support the experience. Lastly, be an advocate for the customer. With all the knowledge you’re gaining with the first two resolutions, you are well armed to be their chief advocate.
The overall theme of these resolutions is that you need to develop empathy for your customers. You’re a marketing leader or perhaps the founder; you should know them better than anyone in the business. Many of your colleagues have a siloed view. Salespeople know their own clients. Product people know how customers use the products. Support knows all the problems.
You have a chance to know what customers need, desire and will value in the future. And that makes you indispensable to the business.
