B2B tech leaders can drive growth by focusing on customers instead of products. Understand your buyers, use data and AI wisely, and align your entire organization around delivering exceptional customer experiences. The goal? Build credibility and turn customers into fans.
Key Takeaways
Put customers first, engage with them often, and turn them into loyal brand advocates.
Analyze data to better understand your customers and make smarter decisions.
Use AI in relevant and meaningful ways to improve CX, but don’t forget the human element: keep it simple and keep it real.
Create a company culture that puts customers at the center, from top to bottom. Be customer-obsessed.
NOTE: This is a deeper dive than normal. I tried to do this in a 5min read, but it ended up being 3x that because there is so much to cover. So grab your fav cup of joe and let’s go!
Meeting or exceeding expectations is no longer enough; we must delight and amaze customers at every opportunity to turn them into loyal fans. With over 14,000 martech solutions alone, prioritizing customer experience (CX) can mean the difference between thriving and merely surviving.
In our pursuit to build the next big thing, we often neglect the voice of the customer and set aside our brand reputation. But standing out requires more than just a great product—it requires an unwavering commitment to the customer. Instead of focusing solely on product-led and sales-led strategies, becoming customer-obsessed and business-led elevates our brand reputation for future growth.
B2B Customer Experience: Understand Who It’s For
If there was ever one domain that could achieve better marketing results from customer research it would have to be B2B tech. Too often we end up building solutions for ourselves and subsequently create insular marketing.
The Importance of Customer Research
Investing in customer research early and often is key to creating better CX. Here are a few things to consider:
Always start with a deep understanding of your best-fit customers. Focus on best-fit. You want more of them.
Differentiate needs: An individual buyer will have different requirements than a procurement team.
Engage in real conversations: Use email, social media, quarterly business reviews, and other channels to have ongoing dialogues with your customers.
Capture insights: Capture pain points, motivations, hopes, and fears and make sure these interactions are documented in your CRM to stay ahead of evolving customer needs.
Create unique positioning: Customer insights are invaluable for positioning your company and products. They provide the foundation for messaging that truly resonates with your audience.
Create effective messaging: Regular conversations with customers help you refine your language, ensuring your messaging speaks directly to their needs and desires. Customers will often tell you what to say and how to say it.
Avoid talking to “ourselves”: Engaging in ongoing dialogue with customers keeps your messaging relevant and focused on their perspectives, preventing you from falling into the trap of internal echo chambers.
Stay proactive: Regular engagement helps you anticipate customer needs and respond to changes before they become issues.
Avoid assumptions: Never assume you know what your customers want, think, or see.
Invest in thorough research: Gather insights into customer needs, preferences, fears, and behaviors.
Engage regularly: Continuous interaction with customers ensures you’re not making assumptions and are always aligned with their needs.
Many B2B tech firms tend to be overly focused on products, often to their detriment. Shifting to a customer-obsessed approach can make all the difference:
Avoid product obsession: B2B tech firms, especially those led by engineers, often focus too much on the product, leading to a product-led or sales-led strategy that prioritizes chasing leads.
Shift to customer obsession: Balance short-term lead generation with long-term brand building by focusing on understanding and delighting customers at every touchpoint.
Create raving fans: Delighting and amazing customers consistently turn them into loyal advocates who will support your brand in the long run.
Follow expert advice: To become customer-centric, heed the advice of business experts like Peter Drucker and Philip Kotler.
Adopting a customer-obsessed mindset give us a better chance at sustainable growth and building credibility that product-led and sales-led strategies alone cannot achieve. This is also how we create raving fans, as described in Fanocracy by David Meerman Scott and Reiko Scott.
Customer Journeys Over Multiple Touchpoints Over Time
In B2B tech, the customer experience can be long and complex. Here’s how to navigate it effectively:
CX has many interactions: It’s not about isolated interactions but the sum of small experiences over many months (or years) that shape your brand’s reputation.
Own it: CX is not a department. Everyone, from the CEO to the person answering the calls, is responsible.
Document the touchpoints: Identify every stage, from initial awareness to post-purchase advocacy, and find opportunities to enhance each touchpoint.
Understand the complexity: B2B tech buying often involves multiple stakeholders, longer sales cycles, and higher stakes, requiring personalized support throughout.
Manage the risk: The biggest competitor is often the status quo and FOFU (Fear of Fucking Up)—the safest decision is often no decision.
Consider the time lag: Marketing Time Lag impacts marketing’s ability to yield results. Markets don’t react on our time. Be patient and persistent.
Buyers take their time and are “all over the map” when they are considering a solution. (Credit: Olena Bomko)
Case Study
In the 1990s, Maximizer CRM was one of the top contact management solutions. But with Salesforce’s rise, the brand lost ground. However, by focusing on customer research, Maximizer uncovered that SMBs found Salesforce too expensive and lacked sufficient support. They didn’t want complex and pricey solutions—they wanted to grow their business with confidence. This insight led to the “Grow With Confidence” campaign, which rejuvenated the brand, resulting in 20% month-over-month growth and over $1.6M added to the sales pipeline. Five years later, the campaign’s impact still resonates.
Prioritize customer insights: Ground your strategy in continuous, thorough customer research to understand their needs, fears, motivations, pain points, and how they perceive your brand.
Adopt a customer-obsessed mindset: Shift from a product-led or sales-led approach to one that focuses on delighting customers at every touchpoint.
Map the customer journey: Identify and optimize key touchpoints throughout the customer’s journey, from awareness to advocacy.
Engage regularly with customers: Move beyond surveys and focus groups by maintaining ongoing, real-world conversations to capture evolving insights, refine your positioning, and craft messaging that resonates.
Document and act on insights: Ensure all customer interactions and insights are recorded in your CRM to inform decision-making and continuously refine your approach.
Applying Predictive and Causal Analytics for B2B Customer Experience Insights
Data is a powerful tool for understanding and enhancing customer experience. Here’s how predictive and causal analytics can elevate your CX strategy:
Predictive Analytics
Use historical data to forecast future customer behavior and trends:
Identify upsell opportunities: Predict which customers are likely to purchase additional products or services.
Spot potential churn risks: Recognize early signs of customers who may leave and take proactive steps to retain them.
Personalize marketing campaigns: Tailor your messaging and offers based on predicted customer behaviors.
Optimize pricing strategies: Use data to determine the best pricing models to maximize revenue and customer satisfaction.
Causal Analytics
Go beyond predictions to understand the underlying reasons behind customer behavior:
Reveal the impact of actions: Understand how pricing strategies, marketing campaigns, and other factors influence customer decisions.
Make data-driven decisions: Use insights from causal analytics to improve marketing effectiveness and enhance brand reputation.
Measure marketing time lag: Understand the delay between marketing efforts and their impact on customer behavior.
If you’re interested in exploring predictive and causal analytics, take a look at Proof Analytics.
Proof Analytics is the only causal analytics platform that can accurately measure brand reputation.
What to do next
Use predictive analytics to anticipate customer needs and behaviors, address issues and seize opportunities before they arise.
Use causal analytics to understand the ‘why’ behind customer actions, enabling better decision-making.
Integrate analytics into your overall strategy to gain actionable insights that drive tangible results, improving customer experience across the board.
Try Proof Analytics by reaching out to Mark Stouse, CEO. He can show you how to effectively measure your GTM.
Integrating Generative AI
Generative AI—large language models (LLMs) and AI image generators—offers significant potential for enhancing customer experience in B2B tech. However, like any tool, AI can create a mess in the wrong hands.
Practical Applications
Generative AI can enhance various aspects of CX:
Personalized customer interactions: Analyze large volumes of customer data to deliver tailored recommendations, offers, and content that boost engagement.
Automate routine tasks: Use AI-powered chatbots and virtual assistants to handle common customer inquiries, freeing up your team to focus on more complex issues.
Content creation: Use AI tools like ChatGPT and Midjourney to generate marketing materials, even without dedicated writers or designers. But be careful! (See “Beware the Pitfalls” below)
Sentiment analysis: Apply LLMs to analyze customer feedback and social media activity, helping you quickly identify strengths and areas for improvement in your CX.
Beware the Pitfalls
While generative AI is powerful, it comes with challenges:
Quality matters: Remember, “Garbage In, Garbage Out.” The quality of AI outputs depends heavily on the data you feed into it. Always fact-check.
Don’t over-rely on AI: These tools should complement, not replace, human expertise. AI lacks the nuanced understanding and creativity that humans bring to content and creative design.
Maintain authenticity: Ensure that AI-generated content aligns with your brand voice and values. You still need human oversight to maintain quality and credibility.
The Queensland Symphony Orchestra’s use of AI is a good example of “design in the wrong hands.”
What to do next
Explore generative AI: Use it for research, content creation, personalization, customer service automation, and predictive modeling to enhance CX.
Use AI to augment productivity: Incorporate AI tools to boost efficiency while keeping human expertise at the core of your strategy.
Be careful: AI makes mistakes. Avoid over-reliance and always align AI-assisted content with your brand’s voice and values to maintain trust and authenticity.
Redesigning Business Processes
To deliver a seamless customer experience, our internal processes must align with business goals that are customer-centric across the entire business. Otherwise, we waste resources hoping our solution will eventually hit—hope is not a strategy.
Turning customers into raving fans starts at the operational roots of the business. (Credit: Alan Hale)
Get Aligned and Fine-Tune
Improving our business processes involves a few key steps:
Map customer journeys: Identify critical touchpoints pre-sale (path to purchase) and post-sale (path to adoption) and redesign processes to optimize these interactions, ensuring they meet customer expectations. Onboarding almost always requires constant tune-ups.
Invest in digital tools: Use automation tools to streamline repetitive tasks and improve efficiency, making your business more agile and responsive.
Align product development with customer feedback: Involve customers early in the development process, gather regular feedback, and be willing to pivot based on insights.
Avoid falling in love with your own product: Validate your ideas with market feedback before fully committing, ensuring they resonate with your target audience. The data doesn’t lie.
Empower employees: Give your team the authority to make decisions that prioritize customer satisfaction, even if it means bending the rules occasionally.
Qualtrics: enterprise-level for complex research and feedback.
What to do next
Focus on the customer’s best interests: That doesn’t mean you should implement every suggestion. Stay open-minded.
Regularly evaluate and refine processes: Continuously assess your business operations to eliminate inefficiencies and ensure they support your CX goals.
Align everyone around CX: Ensure that marketing, sales, customer service, and product teams all share a unified understanding of the customer journey, creating accountability for CX.
Continuously improve efficiency: Make adjustments based on data and insights from customer interactions, and always seek ways to enhance process efficiency across the organization.
The Role of Leadership
When it comes to CX, leaders have the most to gain and the most to lose because they set the tone and direction for the entire company.
Leadership’s Impact on CX:
Model customer-centric behaviors: Leaders must demonstrate a commitment to customer experience, showing by example how to prioritize customer needs in decision-making.
Communicate the importance of CX: Clearly articulate the value of customer experience to all levels of the organization, ensuring everyone understands its impact on the company’s success today and tomorrow.
Align company goals with CX: Make sure the company’s objectives, metrics, and incentives are directly tied to improving customer satisfaction, engagement, and loyalty.
Empower each team: Allow employees the autonomy to make decisions that benefit customers, fostering a culture where customer satisfaction is the top priority.
Encourage continuous improvement: Promote a mindset of ongoing learning and experimentation, where the team regularly evaluates and enhances the customer experience.
What Gets Measured Gets Managed
Measuring customer experience is essential to understanding what’s working and where improvements are needed:
Establish key metrics: Track essential CX metrics such as Net Promoter Score (NPS), Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) scores, customer effort scores, and churn rates.
Collect feedback regularly: Use surveys, interviews, and social media monitoring to gather customer insights and stay informed on their experiences.
Use data for continuous improvement: Regularly review metrics and customer feedback, identify areas for improvement, and implement changes to enhance CX.
Invest in the right tools: CRM, Market Automation, and Causal Analytics measure marketing effectiveness and help track and visualize customer interactions over time.
Case Study
The transformation of BELLIN, a global enterprise treasury software brand, highlights the power of leadership in driving customer-centricity. Martin Bellin, the company’s founder, actively invested in customer research to understand their needs and align the organization around a shared customer-centric vision: elevating the role of corporate treasury.
By focusing on customer experience, BELLIN’s “Treasury That Moves You” campaign achieved significant success, contributing to its acquisition by Coupa. This commitment to customer-centricity not only differentiated BELLIN in the market but also elevated its brand reputation over several years.
Lead by example: As a leader, model the behaviors and outcomes you want to see in your organization, setting a clear tone for customer-centricity.
Measure CX effectively: Implement key metrics to track customer satisfaction and loyalty, and use this data to drive continuous improvements.
Empower your team: Encourage your employees to prioritize customer needs and make decisions that enhance the customer experience.
Hold each other accountable: Reinforce the importance of continuous improvement and customer satisfaction. Your future brand reputation depends on it!
Final Thoughts
A strong customer experience is the cornerstone of brand reputation. The investments we make in our customers, processes, and tools like generative AI and predictive analytics will not only enhance current relationships but also lay the groundwork for future success.
Keep in mind that marketing efforts often have a significant time lag. The brand reputation we build today will provide essential air cover for future sales, helping us weather market shifts and competitive pressures. Prioritizing CX not only improves day-to-day interactions, it gives us the chance to keep our brand top-of-mind when prospects are ready to buy tomorrow.
Take action now to fine-tune your CX strategy, align your teams, and measure your progress. The work you do today will pay dividends in the long run, positioning your company as a trusted source.
If you have any questions or want to discuss any of these ideas, reach out any time.
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