Customer Excellence Is Your Ultimate Revenue Multiplier

Let me take you back to a moment that forever changed my perspective on customer relationships. It wasn't in a corporate boardroom or a high-stakes business meeting – it was in my local coffee shop.

I used to cycle into London City to work on Fleet Street. Maria, the Italian café owner, did not just remember my usual order. She asked about my upcoming events, celebrated my wins, and even remembered to ask how my last presentation went. She's not just serving coffee; she's crafting a relationship. Maria and her employees made me feel special!

Interviewing a CRO on Scale Your Sales Podcast discussing a strategy that enabled their buyers to purchase with ease. They offered that 100% of our leads came through our partners, and creating the solutions to solve this customer business problem has helped the supplier win more business as the customer solutions have helped the customers buy integrated support for the solutions they want to use.

These experiences mirror what I've spent decades teaching global organisations: true customer excellence isn't about transactions but transforming everyday interactions into moments that matter. These moments are not just memorable and meaningful to your customers; they have the power to transform your business and set you apart from your competitors.

Here's What Fascinates Me

While chatting with C-suite executives, I often ask, "When was the last time you measured the impact of your decisions on key customers before making them?" I may get references to NPS, CES, or CSAT, but the uncomfortable shifting in seats tells me everything I need to know. There is a difference between lagging and leading indicators in setting the intention of meaningful results.

And the data backs this up. Would you believe that while 80% of companies think they're delivering "superior" customer experiences, merely 8% of their customers agree?1 If you believe happy customers spend more, this isn't just a slight miscalculation – it's a chasm swallowing your potential growth.

Let Me Bring This To Life

I had the opportunity to work with an educational publishing company experiencing declining sales and poor forecasting. Instead of pushing more books into an already competitive market, I decided to take a different approach.

Instead, I help these global sales leaders to start asking different questions:

"Why are schools experiencing increasing or decreasing registration?" "How is delivering effective education changing?" "How are your teachers' needs evolving?" "What would genuinely transform your students' outcomes?" "What are students wanting, valuing?" "What do parents and school boards need, and how do they measure success?"

These questions revealed fascinating changes: Students value software, not books; teachers need upskilling; regional school boards' measurement of success was not aligned with parents, and our customers, the schools, did not need more books; they needed complex solutions and bespoke packages. Through implementing strategic open questions, we helped our customers uncover shifting priorities and co-create solutions that addressed deeper needs and delivered better stakeholder results.

The result? We pivoted from solely selling books to providing integrated hardware, custom software, and specialised teacher training programmes. Within 12 months, revenue soared by 100% to ￡12 million. But here's the brilliant bit—this growth wasn't from aggressive selling; it came from deeply understanding the customer and serving their evolving needs. This is the potential that customer excellence holds for your business.

The Numbers Tell a Compelling Story

A recent survey from How Buyers Want to Be Sold found that nearly 47% of buyers admit they've purchased the wrong product because the salesperson didn't understand their problem. Companies that excel in customer experience outperform their competitors by nearly 80% in revenue growth2. Customer-centric organisations are 60% more profitable compared to those that aren't3. And here's a statistic that should make every CEO pause: a mere 5% increase in customer retention can lead to profit increases of 25% to 95%?.

Introducing The Scale Your Sales Framework: Pillar 3

This framework creates customer excellence by placing the customer at the heart of every decision, fostering lasting loyalty, and building partnerships that drive growth.

The 6 Key Elements of Customer-centricity to Create Customer Excellence:

1. Strategic Account Management: Prioritising and deepening relationships with high-value accounts.

2. Win-Back and Customer Retention Strategies: Reducing churn and maximising lifetime value.

3. Buyer Enablement: Guiding customers with insights and solutions that simplify decision-making.

4. Experience Design: Delivering exceptional, personalised interactions at every touchpoint.

5. Customer Feedback Loops: Capturing and acting on insights to continuously improve.

6. Advocacy Development: Turning satisfied customers into loyal brand ambassadors.

The Transformation: customer-centric excellence, creating a competitive edge and sustainable revenue growth.

Why is Customer Excellent Critical in 2025?

We are still missing key opportunities. 75% of customers feel businesses don't listen to their feedback or act on their input?. In conversations with C-suite leaders, I often hear, "But we conduct annual surveys!" That's like trying to navigate through London using a map from 1950—technically, it's a map, but you're missing a lot of crucial changes.

Let's Talk About The Partnership Evolution Model

It's a journey I've seen transform businesses by truly understanding where you are:

?????????????????? Level 1: You're a vendor (transactional)

?????????????????? Level 2: You become a solution provider (valuable)

?????????????????? Level 3: You evolve into a strategic partner (essential)

?????????????????? Level 4: You emerge as a growth catalyst (indispensable)

The fascinating bit?

Companies operating at Level 4 see 2.4x higher customer lifetime value?. According to the Harvard Business Review, measuring customer experience drives sales and produces significant results even in a transactional business. In a subscription-based business, a high customer experience score was the difference between a one-year and six-year tenure.

Consider this!

The probability of selling to an existing customer is 60-70%, while the probability of selling to a new prospect is only 5-20%?. Yet, I still see organisations pouring greater resources into acquisition while treating retention as a foregone conclusion. This is why we help companies invest in customer excellence to build retention, customer lifetime value and strategic partnerships.

One of my technology clients implemented "Innovation Partnerships" with their top customers. These were not just feedback sessions; they were collaborative innovation workshops. The result? Product updates that acutely solved the most compelling problems, features that customers genuinely needed, and solutions that practically sold themselves because they had measurable impact co-created with the end users.

What's the next step?

I've developed a Customer Excellence Quotient Health Check to help organisations understand how to improve their customer excellence quotient. It's not just another assessment—it's a conversation starter about where your growth opportunities truly lie.

Click the link to the Customer Excellence Quotient (CEQ) Health Check.

The truth is!

In 2025's competitive landscape, customer excellence isn't optional—it's your key differentiator. It's about creating remarkable experiences that make your customers your most passionate advocates.

Remember Maria from the cafe? She didn't just sell coffee; she created a relationship that made me want to bring every business contact to her café. The best salespeople naturally make their customers feel valued and heard despite some of their internal operational challenges. The essence of customer excellence is aligning revenue operation and leadership in customer-centricity, creating experiences so remarkable that customers become your revenue growth engine.

Let's discuss where your organisation stands on your customer excellence journey to revenue growth.

#ScaleYourSales #CustomerExcellence #SalesLeadership #RevenueGrowth #SalesYourSalesFramework

Article References:

1 Bain & Company, Customer Experience Tools and Trends, 2024 2 McKinsey & Company, Customer Experience: New capabilities, new audiences, new opportunities, 2024 3 Deloitte Digital, The True Value of Customer Experience, 2024 ? Bain & Company (Reichheld), The Loyalty Effect ? Salesforce, State of the Connected Customer Report, 2024 ? Harvard Business Review, The Value of Customer Experience, Quantified, 2024 ? Marketing Metrics: The Definitive Guide to Measuring Marketing Performance

Our Content Theme in February is Customer-Centricity and Retention

Part of ScalPart of Scale Your Sales Framework Pillar - Customer Excellence.

Look out for the free CEQ health check, the poll, and the LIVE discussion later this month.

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Connect with me, Janice B Gordon - Customer Growth Expert FISP FPSA, and explore how my Scale Your Sales Framework helps CEOs, CROs, and Sales Leaders drive exponential growth through customer excellence and sales.

As a recognized innovator in sales, listed among LinkedIn Sales 15 Innovating Sales Influencers to Follow and awarded the prestigious 2024 RevTech Strategist. Whether you are looking to optimize your sales hiring and team development, enhance customer retention, or accelerate your revenue growth, I am here to guide you every step of the way ScaleYourSales.co.uk. Let us close the gaps in your people, process, and profits Compare your sales team to the best in world-class.

Visit JaniceBGordon.com for speaking offers and check out my books, "Business Evolution: Creating Growth in a Rapidly Changing World" and "Heels to Deals: How Women are Dominating Business to Business Sales"

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