Customer Relationships ARE the Key Metric

No business on Earth would be in business without customers. At the end of the day, without customers, we wouldn't have revenue, profit, employees, products, services, growth, stability, and all the other things that make up a successful business.

?

In most businesses, the primary teams that interact directly with customers are marketing, sales, and customer service. So it seems logical that these customer-facing teams have some kind of relationship with each other to improve those interactions, right?

?

But through our recent research and the conversations we have, we discovered that these teams RARELY get along!? In some cases, sales and marketing have never communicated or been in the same room together.

?

Of course, this got our wheels turning:

• Is there something we can do to help?
• Is our focus on inbound marketing valuable to these teams?
• Can we improve how marketing works by including sales?
• Can we deploy processes and platforms to support this?

?

A New Era for Customer-Facing Teams

For years, we've talked about Brightlark as an inbound marketing agency. And since inbound marketing was (and still is) an ever-evolving approach to modern marketing methods, it worked.

?

But as our research shows, marketing is only a part of the equation. And if we aren't considering all of the customer-facing teams, then how effective can inbound marketing truly be?

?

This sentiment aligns well with what we see with our own clients.? It doesn't always matter how well the marketing campaigns and tactics are working, it can be easy for sales to appear "blind-sided" and not have the resources to close or provide feedback to marketing to improve things.

?

With this research and our new ideas in hand, we have decided to forge ahead and focus on a new concept we call "Relationship Operations".

?

Introducing Relationship Operations

You may have heard other agencies talk about "RevOps" (Revenue Operations), and that's all well and good.

?

The reason we don't agree with "RevOps" as a concept is that the sentiment it creates is more internally facing.? It can appear cold, heartless, and money-driven rather than customer-driven.

?

With "RelOps", or Relationship Operations, the customer-facing team's mission is focused on the customer experience more than the amount of revenue those customers generate.

?

People want to feel a connection, a relationship, a level of trust with the brands they do business with, and if a customer ever heard the term "RevOps", they might feel like the business doesn't care about them, seeing them only as a profit creation tool and not as a real human being.?

?

With every new generation of consumers, the data continues to show that younger buyers are more in tune with empathic, philanthropic, human-focused businesses.? And RevOps just doesn't feel like it fits into a world that continues to prioritize kindness, humanity, and transparency.

?