Kicking off an Insanely Great Customer Journey? You Should be!

Revenue, business outcomes and marketing ROI are at stake. This is a pivotal time in business-to-business marketing. The focus?

The same as always. Measuring business outcomes and optimizing marketing ROI from acquiring, building and expanding high value customer relationships. The solution?

An Insanely Great Customer Journey!

2013 is the year in which leaders pull together marketing methodology, automation and analytics. It’s also the year in which the customer journey will emerge as the centerpiece in leadership marketing strategies.

Why is the customer journey taking center stage?

Because it’s the overall experience high-value prospects and customers have across the customer journey that most influence the answer to the CEO’s biggest marketing question. “What kind of return will we get on our investment in marketing and sales?”

The experience your customer journey delivers defines your company to your prospects and customers.

It can establish and deepen a bond of trust between you or break it. It can deliver just the right information, insight or support at the right time, or it can be a maze of undistinguished, disjointed, conflicting, irrelevant and out of date information and difficult to access support. It can provide a continual stream of amazing insights and analytics to your internal teams that help them learn and innovate faster than the competition or it can leave your organization relying on opinions and guesses.

A great customer journey builds lasting bonds with your highest value prospects and customers. Bonds that make you their preferred source for everything you offer. A poor customer journey leaves customers always looking for alternatives. And, as we all know, word about a poor customer experience in today’s digitally connected world, travels ten times faster and further than a positive one.

The net?

A poor customer journey dramatically reduces the value and business outcomes produced by your marketing strategy, campaigns, content, and nurturing programs regardless of how good.

Creating a great customer journey establishes a strategic and tactical rallying and alignment point across your customer facing organizations. The work of creating it establishes mutually agreed to differences, strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats and priorities. As those are addressed you move the effectiveness of your marketing and sales efforts from good to insanely great.

Creating an Insanely Great Customer Journey takes a top-level commitment and requires ongoing investment and management. But the return on that investment is huge. Well designed and managed it will dramatically increase the return on your product, marketing and sales spending.

An Insanely Great Customer Journey focuses your entire organization on engaging in continual learning and innovation with your highest value prospects and customers. It accelerates the value delivered to and created by your highest value prospects and customers. It creates deep management insight into each stage. It delivers a seamless, engaging and personalized experience to prospects, champions and influencers. Each touch point and stage captures and delivers insight to key decision makers in your company. It is a journey that is continually updated and innovated to help your company stay ahead of the competitive learning and innovation curve.

Easy to say. Hard to do. Is there a realistic way to get there?

We think there is and it involves what we call an Agile Business Acceleration methodology.

The key is working in rapid time bound sprints to assess and undertake the needed changes.

Its starts with establishing a clear picture of your highest value prospects and customers and what will create real differentiating value for them in each stage of the customer journey. Next you evaluate your company’s vision, strategy, processes, organizations and systems and customer journey components and prioritize initiatives to align them to better support your vision. Then you work on those priorities in small incremental time bound stages called sprints. Each sprint involves defining the value you intend to deliver to the customer and to your organization and the deliverables required to achieve that and then validating that those actually deliver value. As the feedback comes in, you course correct your overall vision and your priorities for the next sprints.

Using that methodology you are building against a clear vision, delivering, validating and refining that vision in rapid measurable steps that build on the success and learning from the previous stages. The result. Each sprint increases learning, success and momentum and reduces potential risk and waste in the next sprint.

What do you get for all that hard work?

An Insanely Great Customer Journey to start. But you will actually have achieved far more than that. By rallying the customer facing organizations around the Customer Journey and by incorporating not just marketing deliverables but the vision, strategy, processes, systems in that transformation process you will have also built an Insanely Great Company. A company that has capability to learn, innovate and deliver results faster and more effectively than competitors who haven’t gone through this process.

Mike Connor, Principal, Spice Catalyst