32% of customers will stop doing business with a brand they love after just one bad experience. (Data from the PWC Customer Insights Report). This shows how failing to prioritise customer needs and expectations in strategy can erode customer loyalty — even if a brand initially has a strong relationship with them. Without a customer-centric approach, businesses may lose revenue due to misaligned customer experiences, highlighting the critical need to engage with and understand customers.
Here at BlueOcean Agency, our clients can find it challenging to carve out time for customer insight development, like customer interviews. Many rely on ad-hoc sales calls for customer insights, which is practical but will likely not reveal the full picture. We can be more intentional in developing a deeper understanding of the customer.
Here are four insights into the customer-centric approach, and how you can bake them into your day-to-day to support growth across your organisation by shortening the sales cycle and more.
Genuine Interactions Fuel Good Marketing
Customer interviews are a powerful tool for providing a direct line to customer preferences. If we ask the right questions, marketers can uncover a wealth of insights into customer needs and preferences — and copy and campaign ideas for days. A bank of quotes and customer insights can quickly become a sharable resource within your organisation, helping to align sales, marketing and beyond.
“In B2B, being able to talk to our customers directly is our superpower. We’ve often built an environment of trust with clients and customers, and we need to empathise with them. I don’t think you can do that without a genuine conversation.” – Freyja Spaven, Senior Marketer, BlueOcean Agency
Shorten The Sales Cycle with Customer-Centric Assets
A 2020 Salesforce report discovered that 76% of B2B customers expect consistent interactions between departments, yet 54% say it generally feels like teams don’t share information. We can use customer insights to equip the sales team with valuable materials and facilitate the right conversations, helping to shorten sales cycles and support the force multipliers.
For example, when James Igglesden, Product Marketer and Entrepreneur, needed to increase sales at a dental supply organisation, he developed a training program for the sales team. This approach, including creating several “wraparound” sales assets, brought a shorter sales cycle and more conversions.
“One of the things I look for in any organisation, whether I'm a part of an internal team or coming in from the outside, is where are the force multipliers? So if you've got 10 reps and five of them are bringing in 80% of the revenue, how do you make that the standard rep and multiply that number up?” James Igglesden, – Product Marketer and Entrepreneur
Leverage Customer Feedback for Strategic Growth
Business owners can unlock growth opportunities through insights gleaned from customer interviews. Design your interviews to uncover customer pain points and unmet needs and use them to improve existing products and services. A deeper understanding of customer preferences guides us into more strategic decision-making, helping us to focus on the areas that will bring the most customer value.
“Whenever you're making a change in your business, for example, new positioning or a product launch, that’s a fantastic time to start furthering your understanding of what value customers see in your product. Customer interviews are a tool that can help guide the way to more strategic decision-making.” – Freyja Spaven, Senior Marketer, BlueOcean Agency
Discover the Hidden Value in Service Offerings
A customer-centric strategy is not just about products. We can apply it to services, too. Customer insights can discover the value hidden in the services you are already providing to unlock new growth areas. Transform them into standardised offerings by giving them a clear value proposition with tangible outcomes, and you may open doors to new markets and enhance customer satisfaction in the process.
"For a service firm, it's about bottling that service to understand that you're delivering a variable, often time-based service, but what are the tangible outcomes that you get? You can package that up to basically look and feel like a product." James Igglesden, Product Marketer and Entrepreneur
Insights Into Action: Shaping a New Product with Customer-Centric Strategy
To use a real-world example, our client, a car mechanical services company, came to us to launch a new service. The challenge was discovering how to differentiate and launch a successful product into a new market. Through customer interviews, we discovered customers valued a free audit that was always conducted before any mechanical work began. Using real customer insights from interviews, we shaped the audit into a product, unlocking more value for our client and enhancing the experience for the customer, who loved the value-add of an audit service.
If we can leave you with one takeaway, incorporating customer insights into strategy is a powerful driver of alignment and growth across B2B organisations. Everyone benefits from a deeper understanding of customers, helping to deliver more value and unlock new opportunities for growth that may have been overlooked.
