Future of Revenue Growth
The past decades has been defined as the era of Distribution or Information. In the last few years, the Age of the Customer (source Forrester) has got the upper hand. With the information at the fingertips of our customers, the so called Customer Experience or CX is the backbone of success. Beyond Forrester there are many research backing this from Gartner to McKinsey or Salesforce, they all report a direct correlation between CX and Customer Satisfaction (CS) and/or revenue growth.
Another good trend in the business world is to take to hear the employees happiness and experience. Companies who believe in both of these dogmas will incur in a “Virtuous Cycle” (thanks Latané Conant for that tip). This means start treating well your employees and taking care of your customer journey and you will see an increase in both employee experience and customer experience as a consequence of that.
This way of operating is not often made possible in the business world, where most of the organizations are still believing sales and marketing are not heavily affected by data. And even where the data are available we still persist in wanting to use our prospects in our favor and treating them like dirt. We keep being stubborn calling them at every moment of the day and pushing them hundreds of sequences trying our luck. What in reality happens is we push them away and our people get discouraged with very low conversion rates. More importantly, if we could allocate our time and effort where it would make more sense we would have been able to deliver personalized messages to the relevant audience. Eventually, this means more pipeline, stronger relationships, more revenue.
The first thing to do is understand how our customers and buyers are behaving when they are not with us (the majority of the time). Surprise surprise, most of the time they are in other meetings, and getting into their attention level requires a relevant strong message. But buyers are also making their research when they have a challenge. There is an increment in the number of buyers who are looking for a smooth digital experience when evaluating a purchase. In fact, Gartner Says “a Low-Effort, Digital Buying Experience is the Key to Accelerating Revenue Growth for B2B Sales Organizations”, this leaves us with no option than optimizing a “Customer-Centric Buying Experience”.
Gartner’s perspective on this is there are 4 main pillars that lead to exceeding growth targets and creating a buying experience aligned to the new way customers buy. In a nutshell:
New re-aligned go-to-market: Sales, Marketing, Customer Success shift to constant engagement supporting the buyers with value at every touch. Our customers and prospects also don’t need to know if we are sales or marketing or whatever department, they just want to know from their perspective how we help gearing them for success.
Dynamic Customer Engagement: the channel where buyers engage should be the smoothest for them and should adapt to their new habits. Artificial Intelligence (AI) on that could provide the most relevant content and channel based on their predicted behavior.
Buyers need our help in making sense of the project or product they are evaluating. The experience should be low-effort and intended to increase the customer decision confidence. The higher the confidence, the higher is the chance to gain buy-in their organization and convert them into mobilizers (Challenger Sales) or the higher gets your chance to increase your deal size.
Data play a big factor: AI became crucial in helping to deliver more precise insights, better predict customer needs and provide clear guidelines for sales execution.
And to the above I'd also add a couple of points:
Account-Based is becoming a trick none of us wants to leave on the table. Working retrospectively looking at who are your targets and how do they behave is now the best way Go-to-Market organizations can protect their revenue, increase their branding and fight with the competition for market shares.
It is not all about AI and Automation. For those who are wondering if there will ever be an organization without marketers, salespeople, customer success resources the answer is not that tragic as we are thinking. For sure jobs are changing in a way and people in our world are moving into an automated buying and selling experience which leads a big room for the human factor. How can we use the data gathered through AI in the favor of our buyers through a human experience?
This will be the real challenge for all of us dealing with an increase in the expectation to deliver a higher buying experience.
