How to Move Marketing, Sales, and Customer Success from Alignment to Action? Kate Adams
Kate has more than 15 years of tech experience building strong businesses within different stages and industries. She believes deeply in bringing businesses to life in prospects and customers’ hearts and minds by creating compelling and consistent messaging throughout the customer life cycle. I have faith in its criticality for any business to bring the customer’s voice to every aspect of their business marketing, product, customer success, customer service, finance, and alignment with your customer. The customer experience doesn’t begin when they make a purchase, sign the contract, or complete a transaction. It starts the first time they’ve heard your name.
At B2B Binge 4.0, she spoke elaborately on not only how to align different departments and speak the same language but also make it actionable. There is no point in aligning if you cannot take action around it.
To align all the departments to customers’ needs, you have to listen to them ardently. When you listen to them carefully, the departments will understand what needs to be done. These actions will most likely be aligned to customer needs rather than personal goals. When you achieve customer goals and intend to provide delight to them, you will go beyond what is expected of you.
To go beyond expectations it needs more action. Alignment with customers not only provides avenues to take action but also opportunities for taking meaningful action. The effort that aligns businesses and their customer not only externally but also internally. To internalize alignment, it starts with the 1st point of contact, i.e., social media, events, referral, and other channels to post-closure of deals like feedback, upsell and cross-sell systems, and customer re-engagement tactics.
2020 is a revenue era. All actions taken by various departments have to align with how they are aiding in generating revenue by providing delight, not just by cutting costs. Investment in customer delight digitally is crucial for success in 2020. The customer has to grow with you. Therefore, CLTV matters. The realtime conversations matter. It has to be personalized. Customers expect brands to understand them and ask you to deliver how you know them and understand their needs.
The experiences have to be unified and omnichannel. Anyone who delivers these will be a winner because it is a different level of customer experience. The customer experience should have synergy across all the departments. There should be a single source of truth that brings alignment across the organization. The faster and smoother is the flow of leads to deals better it is. The conversions are only possible through conversations and mapping customer needs. This map has to be synced across the organization to have meaningful conversations.
AMA with Kate
Q- Would there be a change in the marketing .activities or just the KPIs as we move towards the revenue alignment?
A- I think it’s both the KPIs as well as the activities. When I say, let me break that down in terms of what I mean. I think marketing must have a lot to talk about CMO and what’s happening with that role and why the tenure of that role is so short. I’ve seen data from anywhere. It’s like 28 months to 43 months is the average tenure for a CMO. Most of the time, such velocity in that role is that as the marketing leader is not able to articulate the revenue that you are driving for the business. So you must have a grasp on attributing marketing gets the seat at the table and keeps the seat at the table to articulate the overall impact that you’ve had on the business. If you’re unable to do that, then no wonder you’re getting much pressure, and there’s much swirl within that organization. So that’s what I mean on the KPIs, so you must be able to draw a straight line from the activity that marketing’s doing into the revenue. For us, we have it’s really around marketing attribution. We use visible, which is an adobe tool to do that. To drive that straight line but also it’s the activities right. So the same activities that you’ve been doing for the last five to ten years. They’re not going to cut it anymore. We’ve seen six years of digital transformation in six months. So that means that if you aren’t able to keep up with that transformation if you’re not pushing yourself digitally and pushing your digital marketers on your team. Then you are going to get left behind fast because I guarantee that your competitors are investing now. What I mean by that is how you are providing sales with the key insights on who the most engaged accounts are. How are you aligning and take action with sales on how you’re going to attack those accounts and land those accounts and turn them into revenue.
Q- What are some of the best chat workflows based funnels that you have seen?
A- So chat workflow that has an entire conversational marketing blueprint that breaks that down. The best workflows I’ve seen takes into account who it is that’s on your site and where they came. From in order of when they got there and then what you want them to do next. If you have those four key criteria within that workflow, I think those are the things that make it to the next level. So how are you able to identify that account, how are you making that qualification process? Because let’s be clear when I’m talking about chat on your website, I don’t want you just to open up your fire hydrant here and let everything through. That’s not at all what we want to do. We still want to qualify and make sure that we’re having conversations with the right people. But how are we qualifying that person elegantly? It doesn’t make it feel like you know some of these forms. I’m seeing they are 12 fields long right, asking the most obscure data. Whereas at drift like we ask for your email, and then I’m able to augment all of that other data in real-time. The on the other side I do the work, I don’t make the customer do the work.
Q- How do I measure the channel level attribution instead of measuring just at the point of conversations?
A- It’s all within, and we’ve gone through a very in-depth project. Internally to do that and nail down what those channels are. We don’t think about it as we don’t think about chat as a channel. I don’t know of any other b2b marketer who says forms are my best channel. That is not a channel, right. Channels are SEO, PPC, Social media advertising, advertising that you’re doing with like different third-party websites, and email. So we don’t think chat is not a channel. Chat is the mechanism through which people convert once they get to your website. So when you do that, then I think it gets to the root of that of the question, which is chatting isn’t a channel, it’s the mechanism. If you’re thinking about chat as a channel, I think you’re thinking wrong about that.
The other thing I want to make sure that people don’t walk away with is that at drift, we were kind of famous for this no forms but that because that was the enemy that we selected. Most of our customers use a combination of forms and chat. When I talk, enabling all of those means of communication, remember the customers have a preference for what works for them as opposed to for you. So the majority of customers have to chat available on top of the forms that they have, and we call that like a second net bot. The Linkedin survey will tell you about the study that they did about five years ago. It says 81% of tech buyers will see your form and walk away. That leaves you with what about 18-19 percent of people that you’re just losing them by just showing them that form. So how can you provide another opportunity for you to convert them? I think about it is like if your form is your door open up a window, so that somebody else can get inside in another way.
