B2B companies are delivering personalized experiences to buyers who are deciding whether to make a purchase. But what happens when those buyers sign a contract and finally become customers?

You’d think that those companies would personalize postsale customer engagement in equal, if not greater, measure. After all, 61% of B2B revenue comes from existing customers through renewals and expansion. And certainly, customers expect personalized experiences.

You’d think … but research from Forrester’s State Of Digital In B2B Marketing, 2023, survey showed that, while 92% of companies use personalization in marketing, only 54% use personalization in customer engagement. Our new report, Personalization Should Pervade The Entire Customer Lifecycle, Not Just The Buying Journey, explains why this is the case and, more importantly, what to do.

Start With A Real Plan For Customer Retention And Expansion

If you’re ready to improve personalization for your customer base, here’s where to start:

    • Give expansion plans the attention they deserve. B2B companies should have an ideal revenue mix of new business, renewals or repurchases, and expansion through cross-sell and upsell. This mix will differ by strategy, maturity, market, and a host of other variables. If the demand strategy for new logos is crisp and clear while the expansion plan starts and ends with “We need to upsell more,” it’s time to get marketing, sales, customer success, and product aligned on real strategies to help customers attain value and drive customer retention and growth. This clarity helps build the case for more focus, including better personalization, for customers’ postsale experience.
    • Face the need for data unification. Data from digital experience platforms, CRMs, marketing automation platforms, customer success platforms, support platforms, learning management systems, online communities, conversation automation solutions, and other sources must be unified and available. Personalization relies on the ability to gather insights and make them actionable, and those insights arise from a coherent dataset.
    • Pare down technology silos. There’s a reason why vendors of purpose-built technology for customer success platforms and communities are integrating lifecycle management, customer success management, and community experiences while using terms such as “hub” and “cross-channel.” When technology is integrated and the drivers of various parts of the postsale journey work together, everyone reaps the benefits: better customer experience, customer retention, expansion, and the creation of advocates who want to tell others what they’ve accomplished. Technology silos make a cohesive approach more difficult.

Personalization can take many forms, including delivering relevant, customized content; driving segmentation; and drawing on persona, role, and behavioral information, all to create great customer interactions. Contact us to take our personalization maturity assessment and pick your next steps in determining a strategy that’s right for your company and for your customers.