The B2B Flight to Customer Obsession Is Taking Off
The B2B buyer landscape continues to undergo dramatic change. For example, younger B2B buyers now rely less on vendors to buy their wares and more on independent sources of information, while purchasing committees divide research responsibilities and decide which supplier will most likely get their business before reaching out to a salesperson.
Customer obsession is fast becoming the cost of entry for B2B marketers. Indeed, executives at customer-obsessed B2B companies report 28 percent faster revenue growth and 33 percent higher profit growth than those companies that are not obsessed, according to "The State Of Customer Obsession In B2B, 2024."
The global survey, based on the responses of 952 B2B decision-makers with titles of director and above, also found that 43 percent of customer-obsessed companies garnered better customer retention than companies that do not meet the highest customer-obsession threshold.
To make customer obsession actionable, Forrester developed a 20-point assessment that determines how customer obsessed an organization is by comparing its leadership, operations, and strategy to a sample of global enterprises. After executives complete the survey, companies are grouped into one of five tiers that reflect increasing maturity, from customer naïve, which reflects a company that does not consider customers central to their business plan, through customer aware, customer engaged, customer committed, and customer obsessed, which is the highest tier.
While only 3 percent of B2B companies in 2024 passed muster as customer obsessed, down from 7 percent in 2023, there was a significant shift among B2B companies into the next tier, customer committed, in which 57 percent of respondents landed in 2024, up from 36 percent in both 2022 and 2023.
To be designated customer obsessed requires a lofty score of 95 percent or better, but to be customer committed is still a high bar, requiring companies to meet 85 to 94 percent of Forrester's criteria, says Amy Bills, VP, principal analyst and co-author of the report. The advance of more B2B companies into the customer committed grouping in 2024 "is very striking," she says. "It reflects an increasing focus on the customer's post-sale experience."
There is no one-size-fits-all formula for companies that want to become more customer obsessed, Bills adds, because there are umpteen variables unique to each organization. So, how do B2B marketers move forward along the customer obsession continuum?
A New Leaf
According to the Forrester study, customer-obsessed companies use up-to-date customer insights to guide strategic and tactical decisions. At B2B data and marketing services provider and ANA member Anteriad, for example, strategy development starts with its customers, says CMO Lynn Tornabene. "We gather insights from every touchpoint," she says. "From in-depth sales conversations, events, and quarterly business reviews to bespoke research, customer interviews, and Net Promoter Score (NPS) feedback."
Tornabene adds that she's eager to empower customers with information that is relevant to them and not limited to Anteriad's thought-leadership content and product offerings. "We bring marketers together through both virtual and in-person events globally, creating spaces where they can learn from each other and from us," she says, adding that the company's website was overhauled this year to make it easier for users to navigate the site and find relevant content faster.
Forrester's report cites ANA member GE Healthcare for going directly to customers to help guide product design. Kate Smiley-Rodgers, global brand media director at GE HealthCare, says product development often starts with teams of product engineers, product designers, and product marketers going into healthcare facilities to connect with people who use their medical imaging, ultrasound, and patient-care technologies and digital solutions.
"At every step of the process — market research, design, prototype — we have a customer feedback loop to make sure we're not operating in our own echo chamber," Smiley-Rodgers says, adding that in-person interactions with customers not only help with product development, but also the subsequent creation of marketing and support materials.
Before GE HealthCare became its own company separate from GE in January 2023, brand marketing for the business units that now comprise GE HealthCare was handled at the corporate level.
o brand the new entity, GE HealthCare marketers conducted ample research with customers, investors, government and policy experts, and internal colleagues. "We learned that people join healthcare professions because they are deeply connected to helping their patients," Smiley-Rodgers says. "This made space for us to start telling emotional human stories instead of only technology stories."
Take "Not Just for Men: Why Women Need to Watch for Heart Disease," which tells the story of Sarah Carthen Watson, a 29-year-old female patient who didn't know she had had a heart attack — just before her wedding day.
The article, which also features a video component, quotes the director of the Women's Cardiovascular Wellness Clinic at Ochsner Medical Center in Jefferson, La., who says there is a huge gap in the number of women diagnosed with heart disease versus women who have it who remain undiagnosed, and recommends that women with risk factors can benefit from a calcium score test and echocardiogram, an ultrasound that assesses the health of a patient's heart.
Smiley-Rodgers says such stories are shared via GE HealthCare's blog, organic and paid social media, and owned and paid newsletters. They are also shared internally to "engage and inspire our colleagues, as well," she says.
The Voice of the Customer
The Forrester report cites software company Zendesk for its use of a customer engagement score that tracks things like an account's interactions with the customer success team, event attendance, perceived usefulness of products, and quarterly reviews.
Kelly Waldher, CMO at Zendesk, says these scores are one input into what he calls "an intricate voice-of-the-customer approach" that is built around data that also includes product usage, sentiment surveys, and product reviews. "Then there are companywide initiatives connected to that voice-of-the-customer data, such as the product roadmap," he adds.
Since he joined Zendesk in July 2023, Waldher has worked to strengthen the relationships between sales, marketing, and customer success, heeding the advice of the Forrester report advising B2B marketers to "make silos an uncomfortable exception." At customer-obsessed companies, the report adds, "KPIs, organizational structure, resource allocation, and recognition revolve around an expectation of collaboration."
"When I got here, sales and marketing were looking at the pipeline [of new business prospects] in different ways, using different data," Waldher says. "Now we have one set of data to run the business and a common set of global pipeline dashboards."
Another change is that sales and marketing no longer control separate streams of potential customers, but share "joint accountability for marketing-, sales-, and partner-sourced pipeline and whether it is converting into bookings and through to revenue," he adds.
Perpetual Beta
Growth is difficult to achieve in most B2B sectors. However, customer obsession can accelerate growth by fueling and sustaining a virtuous cycle.
"When you make the customer the focal point of all decisions and actions, you not only enhance the value you deliver to customers, but you also unlock additional value they feed back into the business," according to Forrester. "This reciprocal cycle of value creation amplifies business performance and gives you the upper hand among your competitors."
One thing customer obsession isn't, though, is a quick fix. "You'll have wins along the way, but customer obsession requires long-term investment and commitment," Forrester's Bills says. "It's a change in mindset that drives everything you do."
Source: Read the original article written by Marie Griffin of ANA here.