Customers decide if your offerings are valuable, not you! The lack of urgency to pivot to customer focus is reflected in marketing approach and programs. The same study revealed that the No. 1 use case for account-based marketing was prospects awareness at the top of the funnel (70%), in contrast with customer-focused use cases — namely, renewal, upsell and cross-sell — each lagging over 30 basis points behind. What these two data points illustrate is that marketers — despite a crisis — do not view customer churn as their problem and continue to focus much of their time and attention on net new acquisition.
Customer experience has fast become a top priority for businesses. But why are so many companies focusing on the customer experience and what happens to companies that choose to ignore it? What about the rep's influence; how might they leverage the relationship?
Customers no longer base their loyalty on price or product alone. Instead, they stay loyal with companies due to their perceived experience and communication they receive. If the duo (company and rep) cannot keep up with their increasing demands, your customers will leave you.
Communicate, Challenge and Coach the Customer with Insightful Education.
Cross-device monitoring a wide range content sources and channels has made it difficult for companies to maintain share of voice and message consistency; that's where your sales reps are most valuable. The disconnect is not maintaining a teaching moment approach. Buyers Expect Insight-ready Engaged Reps. Engaging the client based on behavioral research containing customer intent intelligence (AI) builds dependency and loyalty.
American Express recently asked 1,920 business professionals to share their number one priority for the next 5 years. The results? Customer experience (or CX) came in first (beating product and pricing). Research by American Express found that 86% of customers are willing to pay more for a better experience.
Customer Experience is the New Battlefield
No one wants to do business with a company that treats you poorly. How you feel after an interaction with a clerk or service center has a huge impact on your future purchase decisions. Instead of transactional selling products & features sell satisfied end-results.
Outcome-based benefits is the new teaching approach making it easy for customers to say 'yes' conveying a personalized product/service outcome vision. The new sales world is different. Increasingly, firms and reps are selecting to deliver their FIX as a unit of ONE (a partnership) that can most effectively explain how their offer is going to deliver business value and address a known, and prioritized, business outcome.
The driving ideology behind an outcome-based service model is that companies are selling business outcomes rather than just products. In more sophisticated terms, outcome-based service is “a new business model of outcome-based contracts where the firm is tasked to achieve 1. Outcomes of equipment as a service contract instead of the traditional maintenance, repair and overhaul activities,” according to Industrial Marketing Management.
Having many different working parts increases the resilience of an application/approach. The provider company, rep and support services teams work together to make sure that the 'outcome' proposed has as little complexity as possible, and that the customer can achieve the businesses end result value as quickly as possible. 2. Another advantage that complexity can confer is a better coordinated team effort. That’s because the elements are often highly interconnected.
3. Lastly, for the relationship to be healthy and set up for long term, the rep and provider firm make and confer cohesiveness - inimitability and distinction continually and proactively demonstrating their commitment to working with the customer to optimize and extend their derived business outcome values!
Next in the Series Pairing Strategy Menu Part 4 of 5