What are the most reliable sources for customer feedback in B2B marketing?

1 Surveys and interviews

One of the most common and direct ways to get customer feedback is to conduct surveys and interviews with your existing or potential customers. Surveys and interviews can help you gather quantitative and qualitative data on various aspects of your customer experience, such as satisfaction, loyalty, expectations, preferences, pain points, and needs. You can use different types of surveys and interviews, such as online, phone, email, or in-person, depending on your goals, resources, and audience. However, to ensure the reliability and validity of your feedback, you need to design your questions carefully, avoid leading or biased questions, segment your respondents, and follow up with them.

3 Customer success and support

Another reliable source of customer feedback that B2B marketers can tap into is customer success and support. Customer success and support teams are in constant contact with your customers and can provide you with valuable feedback on their needs, challenges, satisfaction, retention, and advocacy. You can collect and analyze feedback from customer success and support teams through various methods, such as customer service tickets, calls, chats, emails, or feedback forms. However, to use this source of feedback effectively, you need to align your marketing goals with your customer success and support goals, communicate and collaborate with your teams, and act on their feedback.

4 Net promoter score (NPS)

One of the most popular and simple metrics for measuring customer feedback in B2B marketing is net promoter score (NPS). NPS is a measure of how likely your customers are to recommend your products or services to others, based on a scale of 0 to 10. NPS can help you assess your customer loyalty, satisfaction, and advocacy, as well as identify your promoters, passives, and detractors. You can calculate your NPS by subtracting the percentage of detractors (those who give you a score of 0 to 6) from the percentage of promoters (those who give you a score of 9 or 10). However, to use NPS effectively, you need to ask your customers why they gave you their score, segment your customers by various criteria, and benchmark your NPS against your competitors and industry.

5 Customer lifetime value (CLV)

Another important metric for measuring customer feedback in B2B marketing is customer lifetime value (CLV). CLV is a measure of how much revenue a customer generates for your business over their entire relationship with you. CLV can help you evaluate your customer retention, profitability, and loyalty, as well as optimize your customer acquisition and retention costs. You can estimate your CLV by multiplying your average revenue per customer by your average customer lifespan and subtracting your average customer acquisition cost. However, to use CLV effectively, you need to track your customer behavior, segment your customers by various factors, and improve your customer experience.

6 Customer feedback analysis

The final step in using customer feedback in B2B marketing is to analyze and act on the feedback you have collected from various sources. Customer feedback analysis can help you identify your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats, as well as generate actionable insights and recommendations for improving your marketing performance. You can use different tools and techniques for analyzing your customer feedback, such as sentiment analysis, text analysis, data visualization, or dashboards. However, to make your customer feedback analysis meaningful, you need to define your objectives, select your key performance indicators, compare your results, and communicate your findings.

7 Here’s what else to consider

This is a space to share examples, stories, or insights that don’t fit into any of the previous sections. What else would you like to add?