The Evolution to Customer Enablement

Testing Customer Enablement Concept

The recent Sales Enablement Society (SES) conference in Atlanta provided an excellent opportunity to discuss ideas such as expanding the scope of sales enablement to include customer facing roles as well as the customer, directly. As typically is the case, 1 on 1 interactions in person are the best for gaining insight along with a dose of reality.

Here are few takeaways from discussions on Customer Enablement (CE):?

• The best way to start a conversation on this topic: CE is similar to SE, but instead is designed to enable and engage the customer directly. Further, expand internal enablement to include all customer-facing roles and think of this work as continuous throughout the customer relationship.
• Many are intrigued by the idea of direct Customer Enablement given buyers today often self-serve more and more of their journey and want out of email and endless surfing on the internet.?At this point I introduced the idea of replacing email with a combination of customer facing microsites and Slack to drive ongoing collaboration and actions in a far more elegant and easy manner.
• Using examples like prescriptive onboarding checklists (CE playbooks) designed for the customer was a logical point to discuss on how to engage customers and act on their input. As we said to sellers, help us help you by informing us what works when executing plays through input and analytics.
• Many felt improving the customer experience (CX) was also critical. Start at first customer contact to improve a buyer’s first impressions then increase customer satisfaction, loyalty and advocacy along their journey. All agree there are many touch points and it takes time to earn the customer's respect.
• Continuous rating came up when talking CX. Provide the ability to rate satisfaction (Net Promoter Score or other scale) at any stage of the customer journey, not just after sale or service is delivered.?
• If no action is taken, why gather ratings was an interesting discussion. For example, if a low NPS score for week 1 of onboarding, immediately recommend a prescriptive checklist for the customer to take action vs simply saying "I'll pass along your feedback".???
• As we learned with SE, we must go beyond measuring clicks with CE to capture customer sentiment with continuous surveys, status check-ins and collaborations to improve customer success.?????
• There is a buzz for what’s next and SE practitioners are looking for ways to expand their success beyond sales.?

The remainder of this article discusses why SE + CE = Revenue Enablement and conveys a more holistic story that will resonate with the exec team and those that will help you take SE to the next level.

Justifying Customer Enablement (CE)

Why enable customer facing roles and the customer directly? Research from Gartner supports the need:?

• The sales enablement market has broadened beyond sellers to include the enablement of people in revenue-generating roles such as customer success, presales (technical sellers) and marketing.
• An individual sales rep may often receive only 5% of a prospect’s direct time.
• 60% of frontline sales enablement companies are predicted to shift to enabling additional customer-facing roles over the next three years.

Enabling a broader audience beyond sales is gaining momentum. It seems this is especially true with companies that see Sales Enablement as a "company thing" with roles across the organization playing a role in enabling sales. To start down the road of enabling a broader audience, learn from Sales Enablement processes that are proven within your organization today. For example, use cases such as: repeatable enablement for onboarding new sales staff and partners. The good news, a by-product of enabling sales is reusing the process and content already in place to extend to CE. As an example, start with a repeatable customer onboarding process for the first 30/60/90 days based on what has worked internally for sales.?

Customer Onboarding vs Everboarding

For some, the initial customer onboarding is where it ends. After the funds for initial onboarding training and services is exhausted, regular connection with the customers largely ends. As we have learned with sales, continuous enablement and training is required. To change the mindset of one-time onboarding, consider promoting it as Customer Everboarding with repeatable use cases for:

• Regular customer QBRs with actions to stay connected with a cross-functional team
• Prescriptive checklists that ensure perceived value (from the sales process) is realized?
• New product release guides leading with customer examples to create interest to expand value
• Success playbooks for customers with regular status check-ins
• Ongoing events and podcasts to build a customer community and drive adoption
• Targeted banners promoting additional services that add value

Now the challenge, most would agree with the Customer Everboarding concept and associated processes. The question is, how to make it happen on a routine basis for customers with different needs that are at different stages of their maturity? In addition, customers are hard to reach and stay connected with so as part of enablement design criteria, think about how to deliver in a frictionless way that engages customers on their time, not yours.?

The approach we find effective is to start by moving away from email and deliver targeted enablement microsites that support a great customer experience that evolves as you and the customer evolve.?

Market Catalyst

It’s fair to say customer-centric companies have been the first to adopt CE and CX initiatives, it’s baked into their culture. For the rest, we now have another catalyst to consider, economic fear and the challenges it may bring. Introduce Customer Everboarding as a way to protect current business as well as expansion business. View landing a new customer as the beginning of selling with a focus on delivering value to earn the right to renew and expand business. To gain focus and organizational support, graphically represent the flow for your organization’s “onboarding and expand approach” and set KPIs to track progress.

Survey says… many are doing it. At the 2022 SE Society annual conference, Peter Ostrow delivered an outstanding keynote based on data gathered from SE professionals:??

• Today, 98% of sales enablement teams enable non sellers

Thus, content beyond sales is available and we can turn our attention to how we practice Customer Everboarding to communicate, collaborate, act on and improve the journey of both customer facing roles and the customer.?

Going Digital, Customer Enablement Microsites

At CXera we find that enabling customers digitally through microsites makes Everboarding feasible and reduces friction with the customer from day 1. Some customers may be fine with a self-serve version of an onboarding/everboarding microsite, others will need added support. In reality, connecting with customers on a regular basis simply isn’t possible. For many the ratio of CS staff to customers is low, it’s not uncommon to have each CS staff member support 50+ customers.?

Also, if you don’t have repeatable processes to enable customers, where do you start? We recommend templates from our community of partners and customers that are delivering on Customer Enablement today, visit CXera Marketplace to learn more

Start with the enablement templates for many of the use cases mentioned above such as? running customer QBRs, onboarding checklists, customer health surveys and other ways to enable customer success. Tell us what is missing or submit a CE template that you find effective.?

Make Customer Enablement a Company Initiative?

Like SE, breaking down departmental silos is critical. Further evidence from Gartner that cross-functional teams are needed:??

• By 2025, 25% of organizations will create a formal cross-functional counsel to align customer-facing teams that will provide recommendations, governance and oversight across the entire revenue process.

The takeaway is to go with a cross-functional team to lead the way, reduce the organizational drag caused by departmental silos, become customer-centric and eliminate the processes and content that provide little value to customers. Also, as we found in the past, both CRM and Sales Enablement is needed. Now, further down the buyer journey, both Customer Success Management and Customer Enablement are needed so don’t wait to drive the latest Enablement evolution. Knowing the value add of enablement, start down the path of Customer Enablement.?

We had fun creating this animation which is a bit of an oversimplification of enabling the customer journey, but can set the stage for CE and broader Revenue Enablement discussion. Take a few minutes to follow CXera Mike on his journey up Mount Everboarding to raise the NPS flag, deliver customer success and enable profitable revenue!??

Thanks,

Craig

PODCAST: Join?Tom Pisello?and I as we discuss the evolution of Enablement as it expands to reach its full potential to drive profitable revenue: https://lnkd.in/g5bRvKY8