Six Ways That B2B CMOs Can Make Customer Obsession Real

Talk To Your Frontline People Spend time with the people who talk to your customers most often — field marketers, salespeople, solution consultants, customer success managers, customer support representatives, etc. Ask a few simple questions: What’s going well? What isn’t going well? What should we be doing that we’re not? The questions are simple, but the answers may be surprising and lead to meaningful improvements. Proactively soliciting feedback also signals to your team that they should keep it coming.

Walk In Your Customers’ Shoes Have you ever put yourself into your marketing organization’s prospect or post-sale nurture stream? How about filling out a contact form on your website? Customer-obsessed leaders strive to see their company through their customers’ eyes and experience interactions as their customers do.

Quick example: Another company where I led marketing had a form on its website to “contact sales.” Engagement with the form was lower than desired, so we tested and changed the message from “contact sales” to “get started.” What a difference that made! When visitors clicked the button, they were taken to a landing page where they could fill out a short form to schedule a demo, get a free trial, or engage with a product specialist. Offering these options as a next step, rather than pushing prospects solely toward talking to a salesperson, significantly improved engagement and increased the number of people who were willing to give us their contact information.

Align Around The Customer Alignment between marketing, sales, and product teams goes hand-in-hand with customer obsession. Here, I’m not referring to alignment on processes and metrics (even though that’s critical). I mean aligning around customer experience.

We’ve probably all read marketing materials and wondered what the product or service actually does and where the plain-English version is. This typically happens when marketing lacks needed details from the product function (or doesn’t understand the buyer well enough). Another symptom of marketing-product misalignment is sweeping statements that aren’t credible to buyers (such as “We are the only company that can stop 100% of all security breaches”). Buyers will either be confused or, more likely, simply won’t believe you — and will move on to a competitor.

Incorporate Feedback And Invest The Resources Needed To Do So You may (and should) be collecting customer feedback. But unless you take action on it, it’s almost better not to collect it at all.

A customer experience leader who reported to me at a previous company was frustrated because nothing was coming of the customer enhancement requests she was passing on to the product team. Our customer retention numbers were not meeting our goal, and a key reason was that customers felt that their product improvement requests were being ignored. Our product team hadn’t been acting on the feedback because their focus was on new functionality to go after new markets (itself an admirable activity, but not at the expense of underserving current customers).

It was only when we began investing a percentage of the research and development budget into customer enhancement requests that things started to turn around. Not only was it the right thing to do for our customers — it also made economic sense. It’s far more expensive to gain new customers than it is to keep existing ones, so losing customers was making it much harder for us to hit our growth target.

Celebrate Customer-Obsessed Behavior Marketing leaders set the tone for customer obsession in their organizations. That includes acknowledging the behavior when you see it. If a team member provides great service or brings forth customer insights that help you make better decisions, highlight it to the team as an example. This is much more than just giving accolades to someone who stayed up all night or worked all weekend to help a client. In fact, if you find that kind of behavior necessary, that’s a sign you have not embraced customer obsession, but rather, unsustainable employee heroics. As your organization rolls out new processes and considers new offerings, also make it a habit to ask what they will mean for your customers and celebrate those team members who answer that question.