For revenue teams, the question should never be, “Does your organization care about its customers?” We know the answer is always a resounding yes. Instead, the question should be, “Do you know how to provide a brand experience that proves you care about them and solving their problems?”
Use this checklist to help determine if you’re delivering a CX that your prospects and customers expect … and deserve.
Put Employees First, and Customers Second
Putting the employee experience first might sound counterintuitive, but this is a philosophy that 6sense embraces. It’s even in 6sense CMO Latané Conant’s book, No Forms. No Spam. No Cold Calls.
The idea comes from British billionaire, entrepreneur, and business magnate Richard Branson: If you treat your employees well, they’ll take care of your clients.
How positively and passionately will your employees interact with your customers and prospects if they’re miserable and burned out? You can’t inspire your employees to be enthusiastic brand evangelists unless you treat them right.
There are stats to back this up. According to Salesforce, companies that prioritize employee experience in order to deliver a premium customer experience achieve 1.8 times faster revenue growth.
Know Your Customer
Research indicates that 84% of B2B buyers are more likely to buy from sales reps and companies that understand their goals. In spite of that, almost 60% of buyers say sales reps often lack adequate knowledge of their business.
To make sure your company and reps stay out of that 60%, you need to understand your customers’ needs. You can achieve this with an account-based approach and a solution that supports it, like 6sense.
An important element of ABX is having an in-market ideal customer profile, or IICP. You can learn more about IICPs and how to determine yours here, but to make a long story short, an in-market customer profile shows you accounts that are most likely to:
- Buy from you
- Be profitable for you
- Be satisfied with your solution
- Buy your solution now
These factors are determined based on firmographic data such as company size, industry, revenue, and more, as well as buyer-intent data that tells you when accounts are ready to buy.
Intent data comes in the form of website visits, both on your website and others, as well as non-branded and branded keyword searches. Within this data lies insight into what your customers care about and the problems they hope to solve with a solution like yours.
When you know who your customers are, when they are ready to buy, and what needs they have, you can shape a much stronger customer experience. Your communications are tailored to their specific needs, and one-size-fits-all outreach and assets become a thing of the past. As a result, customers feel seen and understood, view your brand as an expert in helping them reach their goals, and are more likely to go with your solution.
Offer Personalized Experiences
As of 2020, 52% of customers expected offers to always be personalized, and that number is only going to grow in the days ahead.
Personalization gives customers a CX that feels bespoke. And according to 93% of B2B professionals who personalized website content, it increases company revenue, too. For those reasons, messaging can — and should — be personalized across all channels and platforms, including online ads, nurturing campaigns, marketing assets, sales team talk tracks, and of course, your website.
Getting started with personalization can feel overwhelming when you consider how many different types of messaging you’ll need to build out for each industry, persona, buying stage, etc., but our advice is to focus on scalability and start small.
Resist the temptation to customize everything. Instead, focus on what matters most to your revenue team and your buyers. You can do this by strategically segmenting your buyers into groupings, ideally based on Annual Contract Value, and prioritizing personalization for segments where your revenue team will get the most bang for the buck.
From there, you can curate personalized content based on:
- Keywords
- Competitor keywords
- Buying stages
- Value propositions
- And other important business factors unique to your customers
It’s important to not customize messaging too much. In addition to the problem of extra effort with diminishing returns, there is a certain level of personalization that can feel invasive or creepy.
Instead, focus on aligning your messaging across channels so buyers have consistent, personalized-at-scale customer experiences.
Conclusion
These are just a handful of things for companies to consider when they’re thinking about creating a CX that their customers and prospects expect.
If you’d like to learn more about ways to create an ideal customer experience based on ABX best practices, visit our Resource Library.
