Reinventing customer engagement

Your business will almost certainly have been impacted by significant change over the past couple of years.?From moving employees into work-from-home and now hybrid environments, to dealing with supply chain disruption, business resilience has been the ever-present goal for every organization.

The ever-present solution is to become more digitally connected: to your employees, your partners and especially to your customers.

The relationship between technology companies and their customers is one of the areas of the most profound change. B2B buying teams now spend about 90% of their time online during their buying journey and have jumped 7-years ahead in the adoption of digital or digitally enabled products. ?There is an accelerating trend for B2B buyers to expect their digital experience to match their personal experience as consumers.

So all businesses, whoever they identify as their customers, must look at the experience they’re providing. The challenge for B2B companies is that buying journeys are not linear.?Relationships are cultivated and loyalty should never be assumed.?Interactions span multiple channels and their non-sequential nature shifts the burden to the seller to connect the dots.

Companies need to gather all this data, integrate it, analyze it, and make the insights available to multiple groups in the business so that they can be steered by the customer. The old way of looking at Going-to-Market with an inside-out, sales process-driven approach is as modern as listening to Duran Duran on a Sony Walkman.

Many companies have this problem.?In fact, 79% of CEOs of B2B companies say they do not have end-to-end alignment in their revenue production.?At the same time, the amount of time that buyers spend with software vendors is steadily decreasing.?In fact, Gartner says that time spent with vendors amounts to only 17% of the buying team’s time.???

Change is required.

Here’s how Software AG is tackling the challenge: We have adopted an outside-in approach which is constructed based on our customers’ buying journey - as opposed to our sales journey.?This is a significant change that means Go-to-Market roles (Marketing, Sales Development Reps, Sales, Customer Success) are working in an integrated fashion, as opposed to the serial, “throw it over the fence” traditional style. Specifically, we are:

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1.??????Making it easy to change.??

We introduced a new Customer Engagement Framework so that our Go-to-Market roles and partners are better equipped to support our customers digitally based on where they are in their customer journey.?All GtM roles have access to an online resource that links to research, demos, customer stories, and digital tools.

2.?????Making it fun to change. ?

For the first time in over two years, we ran a Global Roadshow to onboard colleagues to the new framework.?This summer, trainers, subject matter experts and Go-to-Market roles travelled to six locations around the world for two-day sessions.?The first day was focused on the new customer engagement framework, and the second day applied this to real life examples focused on business outcomes.?Contests and gamification kept engagement lively.?You can see the energy of meeting in-person after so long.

3.????Making change a positive constant.?

And, as you probably know from your own change management programs, reinforcement is key.?We are taking a data-driven approach to develop just-in-time trainings to support local teams in the adoption of solutions, best practices, methods and tools. ?In addition, all Software AG colleagues, as well as customers and partners, have access to free, self-paced eLearnings that is acknowledged by earning a digital badge which can be shared on social media.?

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These initiatives need to be measured so we can understand what is working - or not.?Success requires consistency, repetition, and evolution as we gain insight.?At the end of the day, our success will be measured by the customers’ ability to achieve their unique goals with our differentiating solutions.