The biggest mistake that many companies make in their B2B sales and marketing activities is the way they fragment or silo different touchpoints in the customer journey among disparate functional teams. And, worse, the way they make it difficult for those teams to work together. Customer experience matters for B2B marketers. You’d think you would make that easier to bring to life.
You’ve got a product marketing group that develops the content around your products. You’ve got a content team that develops landing and promotional pages. You’ve got a search marketing team that tries to drive people to those pages. You’ve got a social marketing team, ditto. You’ve got a conversion rate optimization squad that tries to generate leads. You’ve got a CRM team that focuses on developing those leads, funneling them to the right salespeople, and turning them into sales. Or you’ve got one very overworked team trying to do all of these at the same time. And who don’t have near enough time to work together.
You’d think that in 2019, this wouldn’t still be true. “Customer experience is queen” and all that. But, since people keep hiring us to help them untangle that knot, it seems that’s not the case.
Don’t get me wrong. I love helping clients sort out these problems. But that’s clearly not the best solution for your customers. Here’s why. And what you can do about it.
Here’s the thing. Your customers, without being mean about it, don’t really care about you. They care about their own needs, their own problems. As the old joke goes, “Your customer doesn’t want a drill. They want a hole.” At best, especially early in your relationship to the customer, you’re a solution to a problem. Over time, with patience, skill, and more luck than any of us want to acknowledge, you can become a trusted partner. But at the start, you exist only to — and only if you — solve a problem.
That’s why most folks start with search. We consistently see sites receiving at least 40% to 60% of their traffic from organic and, to a lesser extent, paid search traffic. The good news is that the customer is telling you what she wants. She’s literally asking for your help. The bad news is that so few sites succeed in answering her question. Isn’t that part of the customer experience?
In fact, it’s the first chance you get to both create a great experience and to develop a relationship. Why aren’t those better connected? What questions do your best customers ask? Is that information shared with your search marketing team? With your product marketing team? With your content team? If not, why not?
When you fail to connect these functions, you risk breaking the steps of the customer journey — and of breaking the customer experience. It’s tough to create a great customer experience or a great customer relationship when you don’t listen to the questions your customer asks and help them move from one step of the journey to the next.
The truth is that you care about customer experience because it literally informs every step in that customer’s journey. You care about search because, for most companies, it represents the first step in that journey. You care about account-based marketing (ABM) because it helps connect you with the specific needs of an individual customer. You care about behavior-based personalization because, well, it does the same thing.
So how can you fix this? It’s simpler than you might think.
Grab your colleagues from another team. Order a pizza or two. Start talking. Start sharing data. Start measuring where you lose your customers along the way. And start working together to fix those breaks.
Customer experience matters for B2B marketers. In fact, I’ve gone so far as to say many times that customer experience is queen. For B2B marketers, it’s especially true. So give homage to the queen. Help your team get to know her. And don’t be surprised when she showers you with riches.
