Plenty of room for revenue growth in B2B strategy often overlooked
What is the primary driver of growth within your B2B organization? Often, we immediately think of acquisition, and that’s not surprising. Over 60 percent of the market thinks the same way. Yet, you can also look at it differently, how? Acquiring a new customer costs 6 to 8 times more than retaining an existing one, this is well known. Additionally, we live in a world where customer experiences, meaning how a customer views your services or products, will be the most important pillar of competitive advantage in 5 years! So much more important than, for example, price and product. Why then do we still so often see that this ‘customer experience’ reality is not included in strategies? Why do we judge based on the number of new customers and not the number of customers retained or whose revenue has increased? You can probably think of enough examples yourself where, as a loyal customer, you did not receive the same attention as a prospect and therefore left or considered doing so. Could it really be that ‘ownership of the account (customer) is the end of the fun (attention)’….
Research by Harris Interactive shows that not only is acquiring a customer up to 8 times more expensive, but also that 86% of customers would pay more for a better experience. Research by Forbes Insights among 350 North American companies with at least $500 million in revenue shows that 70% of resources are invested in servicing newly acquired or acquiring new customers. B2B companies are massively leaving the low-hanging fruit, more revenue from existing customers, untouched! The cause is the strategy, because in B2B organizations it is mainly developed from sales and essential insights from the rest of the organization are therefore often not included.
Sales, marketing, service, and technical departments are often completely isolated from each other and therefore cannot combine insights into both needs and market. Because companies often focus on the functioning of their own organization, and not the customer, each department uses different systems and techniques. Even if sales had access to marketing’s systems, they would be able to extract very little information. By placing the customer at the center of all these processes, and for example using one system for all data and communication, teams are better able to leverage each other’s knowledge and insights. This increases both customer satisfaction and revenue! We previously wrote about the ‘siloing’ of business functions and how we use the concept of market interaction to think differently about organizations in the article: From Marketing to Market Interaction.
B2B Strategy is More Broadly Supported
The next step is involving all departments in the strategic process. This not only broadens support for the strategy but also makes the organization more agile and future-proof. Forbes research shows that integration leads to 20% more valuable customer contacts and the identification of additional needs. By integrating, both results and customer satisfaction improve, and as we said, in 5 years customer satisfaction will be the primary factor for competitive advantage!
Inspired by the above story and want to discuss further about placing the customer at the center in B2B or using marketing and communication tools to increase revenue and customer satisfaction, let us know! You can also reach or follow us via LinkedIn or Twitter.
