The rapid adoption of Account Based Marketing (ABM) and Account Based Growth (ABG) in recent years has driven the focus on customer-centric marketing. Marketers are no longer solely focused on feeding high quality leads to sales but also on partnering with sales and other customer-centric functions like customer success teams, to get the most revenue from existing customers and driving far higher conversion rates with prospects. In order to evolve into authentic customer-centric marketers, skills need to change.
Here are my top tips for setting customer-centric marketers up for success.
- Leaders must take responsibility for setting up their customer-centric marketers for success. This is a strategic investment that will need to be given time to deliver brilliant returns, consistently. Your team members will relish the value you’re giving them, especially if this is an extension to their existing role!
- Provide time for development and training. Blocking out time in your team’s agenda is a very simple way to facilitate and give explicit permission. I’ve done this by allocating 3 hrs/week for team development which works well, especially when asking for feedback during the next team meeting so that team members can share their training insights and also tips on how they like to learn and develop. This reinforces good habits and ensures knowledge sharing. Of course, if formal training is required, the budget will need to be considered and planned for. Marketers deserve training beyond the usual sales enablement training that’s available.
- Encourage knowledge sharing. A lunch-and-learn, or virtual coffee are easy (and free) ways to connect team members. And those sharing what they’ve learnt will get a confidence boost from it as it reinforces their knowledge too. This usually prompted additional conversations between colleagues across functional teams or regions, with the end result being much tighter collaboration. Magic starts to happen!
- Mentoring is a brilliant way to share knowledge and experience with those that are building skills, as well as a very efficient way of problem-solving. This can be achieved by in-house mentors, via a network or with a third party that has experience. Often the third party is incredibly useful as there’s a neutrality that opens up a lot of opportunity to ask potentially awkward questions, or dig into an area to understand specifics in more detail. This can lead to knowledge gaps being shown really quickly.
- Create tools, e.g. playbooks and a centre of excellence, to bring customer-centric marketers together to create consistent best practices. Get commitment here by having an executive sponsor, building out a charter and agreeing regular touchpoints.
Winning marketing teams are set up for success. Investing in your customer-centric marketers drives understanding, engagement and satisfying the needs of targeted customers. The result is that relationships build, reputation deepens and revenue grows and accelerates. We can help you navigate putting the same customer at the heart of both marketing and sales plans.
