Featuring:
Amy Hawthorne, Principal Analyst and Rick Bradberry, Principal Analyst
Show Notes:
B2B marketers and sellers know they should be more customer-centric but typically try to layer customer centricity on top of their existing practices, rather than rebuild those practices with the customer in mind. On this week’s episode of What It Means, Principal Analysts Amy Hawthorne and Rick Bradberry explain why B2B companies need to transform their revenue processes to provide more value to customers. They also share insights on how to make this shift.
Hawthorne notes the disconnect between the work that marketers do to understand their target audiences — such as building out buyer personas and ideal customer profiles — and how they operate. “We turn back internally and start to focus on … how we’re being measured, how much [marketing and sales] are each contributing. We lose sight of what we’re actually trying to deliver, which is trying to create value with the customer and build a relationship.”
The analysts then delve into the practical steps needed to incorporate customer value into marketing and sales processes. Hawthorne and Bradberry explain the importance of aligning internal processes with the journey that customers follow before and after purchasing. This requires marketing, sales, and other customer-facing teams to work cross-functionally to ensure that customer insights are shared to provide a more relevant and personalized experience for customers.
The analysts acknowledge that this transformation is hard work that takes a cultural shift. It requires “honest and candid leadership among go-to-market leaders to be really customer-centric and customer-focused,” Bradberry says. “Somebody has to jump out and recommend that we come up and out of our silos and stop passing work from one group to the next to the next.”
Later in the episode, the analysts share success stories of companies that have begun transforming their revenue processes to be more customer-centric. They also touch on a new framework that aligns the buyer process with the work of marketing, sales, and other customer-facing teams, which will be unveiled in a keynote session at Forrester’s B2B Summit North America.
