A robust Customer Growth Framework ensures your business maximizes the value of every customer

My recent article highlighted the benefits of a holistic approach to customer lifecycle management. Aligning cross-functional teams that interact with customers is critical to fulfilling the promises made during the sales process. According to research by Rosetta Consulting, highly engaged customers purchase 90% more frequently and spend 60% more per transaction, contributing to triple the annual revenue compared to disengaged customers.

So, why do businesses struggle to implement this approach?

One major obstacle is the fragmentation of customer engagement due to the misalignment of team goals, KPIs, priorities, and processes. Post-sales, marketing also misses the opportunity to re-center the organization around the customer. Organizational efforts often focus on capturing customer sentiment via satisfaction surveys and Net Promoter Score (NPS) without empowering frontline teams to influence meaningful change.

Breaking Down Silos for a Unified Vision

Overcoming the post-sales challenge of siloed teams requires a unified approach, starting with a shared understanding of the customer journey, common language, and aligned goals. As the customer advocate, marketing is pivotal in fostering collaboration across teams. Data integration across Customer Relationship Management (CRM), Marketing Automation Platforms (MAP), and other systems provides invaluable insights into customer behavior and preferences, offering opportunities for optimization of the customer experience.

Developing a Customer-Focused Strategy

Adopting a customer-first strategy requires a major shift from sales and business-centric to customer-centric practices. This involves:

Adopting an Outside-In Perspective: Transitioning from a sales-led, process-driven approach to one that prioritizes the customer lifecycle and buying signals. It's a shift in culture and mindset from an inside-out approach that lives or dies by internal processes to an outside-in (customer-centric) strategy that lives and breathes the entire customer lifecycle.

Empowering Marketing: Enabling marketing to implement agile, adaptive programs tailored to various customer needs and stages, from acquisition and upselling to retention and loyalty. Marketing has a strategic role to play in creating value across the entire customer lifecycle. For example, B2B marketing teams are mostly focused on generating sales-qualified leads, and not on facilitating existing customer engagements and seeding future demand. The lifecycle marketing strategy with adaptive marketing programs and an outside-in approach, enables marketing teams to focus on short and long-term goals driving value and revenue growth across the full customer journey.

Enhanced Customer Understanding: Shifting from generic buyer profiles to dynamic audience engagement strategies that anticipate customer needs and interests, fostering deeper connections. It's important to consider both known and unknown audiences.

Facilitating Cross-Functional Collaboration: Encouraging teamwork and collaboration across departments to uncover new opportunities and provide value throughout the customer lifecycle.

Connecting Customer Experience to Revenue

A robust Customer Growth Blueprint integrates three key areas: Lifecycle Management, Lifecycle Marketing, and Customer Growth Strategies. This framework is about managing the entire customer journey strategically, ensuring that every interaction adds value and fosters long-term engagement.

Customer Lifecycle Management

Developing a robust Customer Growth Blueprint requires a deep understanding of the entire customer journey - from initial contact to post-purchase interactions. According to McKinsey companies that use customer journey maps experienced a 15-20% decrease in the cost of services!? Below are three key elements that underpin this strategy:

The customer experience baseline: the starting point is understanding what the customer is trying to achieve, including outcomes and what they're experiencing at each step of the journey. What does that ideal customer experience look like compared to what the company is offering? Also, understanding what outcomes matter to the customer. Often, we'll see that these are disconnected.

Customer touchpoint orchestration and moments of truth: The touchpoints and channels between the customer and the organization's teams. These can be high-touch, personalized experiences involving customer success, services teams for in-person experiences, digital or low-touch for more automated or self-serve engagements (e.g., online training), or hybrid—a combination of human and automated experiences, e.g. onboarding, training, renewals.?

Services blueprint: what customers experience in their interaction with products/services is the culmination of internal operations. Here it’s important to capture and optimize cross-functional processes and tools teams use to engage with the customer, as well as the measured output – i.e. impact on customer experience.

Opportunity for AI

Leveraging AI and analytics can accelerate customer value realization, enhancing engagement and loyalty. Thanks to Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Machine Learning (ML) algorithms, eg. AI can deliver the first line of customer support via Chatbots.

Now that we've provided a high-level overview of Customer Lifecycle Management, the question begs: Where do you start??

Retention starts with Onboarding!

Research by the Customer Success Association found that B2B and SaaS customers who experienced a poor onboarding process were more likely to churn within the first 90 days of their subscription. Challenges arise in several areas, including product implementation, product/solution complexity, the need for change management, user adoption and training, having the right strategies, skills, and resources to deploy a solution, and much more effectively. Failure to address these issues during onboarding risks customer reluctance to expand or renew, ultimately damaging the brand.

Customer Lifecycle Marketing

This strategy involves engaging with customers at each stage of their relationship with your business and tailoring marketing efforts to meet their evolving needs. It emphasizes understanding audiences and crafting interactions that lead to successful outcomes.

A lifecycle marketing strategy can help:

• Grow customers through enhanced purchasing experiences
• Enhance sales by converting first-time purchasers into loyal customers
• Turn customers into brand ambassadors
• Boost marketing return on investment (ROI) and enhance lifetime customer value

?Key milestones in developing a Lifecycle Marketing Program:

• KYC – Know Your Customer. Understand customer and user personas, audiences, and behaviors
• Understand and map out the various behavior and action triggers
• Design and develop an integrated and multichannel marketing strategy, beyond emails
• Develop adaptive marketing programs tailored to different customer lifecycle strategies: engagement campaigns, retention, expansion, and loyalty

AI and Customer Lifecycle Marketing

AI can analyze vast amounts of customer data, including behavior and preferences, enabling marketers to gain valuable insights into customer journeys and product interactions to tailor marketing programs.

Customer Growth as a Revenue Driver

For B2B and SaaS companies, maintaining a high customer retention rate is crucial. The average annual customer retention rate for the SaaS industry is 50-68%. In the intricate landscape of growth and revenue marketing, mastering expansion and retention strategies is paramount, with adaptive marketing programs emerging as indispensable tools. Deeply rooted in data-driven insights and supported by advanced analytics, these programs are pivotal for retaining existing customers and fostering organic growth.

The Learning Organisation and Feedback Loop

Successful organizations that adopt a holistic Customer Lifecycle Growth Framework, such as the Customer Growth Blueprint, are best positioned to foster growth and brand loyalty. A continuous feedback loop, fuelled by insights from customer experience and operational metrics, enables organizations to refine strategies, enhance customer satisfaction, and ultimately drive revenue growth.

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