Last week on the Software Channel Partner Podcast, Forrester principal analyst Jay McBain was my guest. He had lots of surprising and useful insights about how to succeed in the rapidly-changing channel (such as that it’s changed more in the past 18 months than the previous 35-40 years). You can listen to the podcast on Apple Podcasts, Google, Spotify, and all major podcast apps, and here.
The biggest marketing opportunity for your company?
I recently did a three-hour marketing workshop for a group of CEOs. After an hour and a half or so I summarized the first phase of my Bullseye Marketing approach and asked them which program they thought could be most useful for their company:
- Understanding their customers better
- Improving their customer experience
- Selling more to current customers
- Improving their website messaging and experience
- Improved conversion optimization
- Email marketing
- Remarketing
- Better alignment of marketing and sales
Overwhelmingly, for this group, they thought that improving their customer experience could have the biggest, quickest impact.
And it certainly can. More than any logo, colors, or catch phrase, your customer experience is your brand.
A common framework for understanding the customer experience is the 5Es (see page 39 of my Bullseye Marketing book):
- Entice: How do customers first hear of us? How are they lured into doing business with us?
- Enter: What’s their initial experience with us?
- Engage: How do we interact with them as they do business with us?
- Exit: What is the end of their experience like?
- Extend: How do we encourage repeat business?
Improving the customer experience is not a top-down activity. You must involve the customer and front-line employees deeply. You may want to start with a few quick-fix items: parts of your customer experience that you know are inferior and which customers would really appreciate improving. A more in-depth approach can go on for weeks or months, and ultimately you want to put the creation and maintenance of a superior customer experience at the center of everything that you do.
Surprisingly, most customers think that the customer experience that they’re getting is not improving. And they think that it’s very important. So if you put a priority on customer experience, it can become a true competitive advantage.
