All business leaders are looking for ways to improve sales execution and revenue retention in today’s changing business climate. Sellers and marketers have long claimed customer experience is a priority, but customers now need value-add experiences more than ever. According to a 2019 study by Gartner, customer experience (CX) ranks among the top three areas of marketing investment, so business leaders must be laser-focused on optimizing customer interactions across the enterprise. If customer experience is such a great focus, then why is value realization for existing customers still a challenge?
Deliver Valuable Insights to the Buyer
Relationships are based on trust, and this trust starts with the first promise you make and ends with the first promise you break. Your customers are more than “black and white” data sets, and the relationship developed with them needs to go far beyond a perfunctory series of meetings or emails designed to get their attention.
Value will arrive for your customer, once you put in the time, in the form of delivering insights based on their unique goals at every touchpoint in the buying journey. To offer these valuable insights, you need to really understand your customer– this is a key tenet of relationship selling, which is all about adding a human element to conversations and proving that you know your customers’ needs, the best way to engage with them, and you can solve their business problems.
To get to know a customer’s unique goals, business leaders should zoom out and consider the buying journey from a lifecycle perspective. View your customers across their buying journey and, for many leaders, this perspective will illuminate a missing alignment between sales, marketing and customer success teams that must be addressed.
Build a United Revenue Team
To make the B2B buying journey simpler, smarter, and more connected, enterprise businesses need to shift away from a siloed model and build revenue teams that work together to drive revenue by providing customer value. Customer Revenue Optimization (CRO) is the new trend behind this shift, and it is refreshing processes from content operations, through sales and proposal management, to post-implementation reference management that ultimately feeds back into the content and sales cycles.
For customers, a revenue optimization model means the delivery of ongoing value throughout their buying journeys. The idea is to offer value at every touchpoint from initial discovery to content automation, reference management, and all the way to customer success and renewals. This concept along with providing the right information at the right time, sets up the customer with a personalized buying journey that builds a solid relationship and makes customers more likely to turn into your advocates by the end. Every touchpoint with a customer produces key insights about their goals and data about how to provide value tailored to an individual customer. In sum, the revenue team works together to build up a pipeline, improve win rates and provide valuable insights throughout buyer journeys in order to, ultimately, achieve an acceleration in sales velocity.
In today’s rapidly changing business environment in which customers expect more and more highly tailored experiences, leaders need to zero in on providing great value for their existing customers. By uniting one revenue team to be more involved in the buying journey, your customers will benefit from the simplified journey to increased value realization.
