It appears that the customer experience is becoming a two-way street. According to new research, there are increasing numbers of satisfied customers transitioning into brand advocates, influencers, collaborators and innovators. However, clients can only be tapped into those roles if they’re satisfied with their customer experience and the product they purchased.
To generate that support, organizations need to deliver a consistent brand message across all points of the sales funnel and internal teams, as well as take a customer-centric approach to marketing strategies. To provide insights into how organizations can improve their customer experience, Demand Gen Report sat down with Michael Londgren, CMO of Seismic, a sales enablement platform, to discuss the best business practices to convert customers into advocates.
Demand Gen Report: How do you see brands evolving their strategies to keep customers at the forefront of their marketing efforts throughout 2021?
Michael Londgren: I think a key part of the company’s brand is its customer success, and prospects are very interested in knowing what existing customers are doing. Bringing forth that voice of the customer through videos, testimonials and online content helps shape perceptions of the company, its offerings and value it provides to its customers. The company’s core value proposition is associated with having customers that are truly getting value while using the solution.
DGR: How can internal teams work together to create exceptional experiences that are worth sharing?
Londgren: The key way that marketing, sales and customer success teams can deliver exceptional customer experiences is to be aligned on the core mission. For example, our mission at Seismic is to unite sales and marketing to enable organizations to share their most compelling stories and grow their businesses faster. We deliver on that mission with our value proposition, the way we engage with customers around their challenges, the solutions we provide and the way we quantify value.
Our customer success organization then engages with the customer to ensure they’re actually getting that value. Marketing, sales and customer success must act in a customer-centric, consistent manner to ensure that the company is delivering a fantastic customer experience.
I’m passionate about the partnership between sales and marketing. At Seismic, we unite sales and marketing teams in engaging customers in impactful ways. We have a platform that helps our customers do that at-scale. We’re working with companies like IBM, HP, Microsoft and more to help them solve their customers’ real problems in a way that provides the buyer/buying team with a rich experience. Our platform enables organizations to engage fundamentally with the prospect and bring a consistent approach in terms of messaging and positioning, and bring a compelling experience that helps prospects make a buying decision.
DGR: How can internal teams use those tips to showcase customer success?
Londgren: The first and most important thing is working closely with customers to ensure they’re getting real value out of an organization’s solutions. This includes delivering a strong value proposition, making sure customers can easily adopt the solution and get value from it, and then check in with them throughout their adoption journey. Then, businesses can leverage them as references for prospects, review sites and more.
DGR: Why is showcasing customer success the future of marketing?
Londgren: In today’s world, prospective customers have a broad choice of different offerings they can choose from. What they’re really interested in are the solutions that truly meet their needs. Marketing can surface its own company’s offerings and its value proposition, but at the end of the day, prospects are going to want to hear from existing customers.
The future of marketing is customer success, which is this notion that prospective customers want to understand what an organization’s existing customers are doing today and the value they’re getting before making a purchase decision.
