Executive Forum

Growing Revenue With Seamless Flow

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Alexander Group’s recent Executive Forum, 24X7 Customer Experience, The Next Chapter, demonstrated how industry leaders create a successful Digital Revenue Organization by prioritizing customer intent, incorporating new mindsets and deploying advanced tools.

Guests were welcomed with an innovative perspective on the link between Marketing, Sales and Service and the need for a seamless flow across the organization.

Delivering Value Requires Solving the 24X7 Customer’s Problems

Today’s buyers are sophisticated, moving rapidly from awareness to solution-seeking. No longer dependent on a corporate brochure, buyers now have substantial power. Moreover, they now leverage that power to solve problems and achieve desired outcomes that align with business goals. Marketers and sellers have a limited time to gain customer trust, understand their challenges and demonstrate value.

Value revolves around how your products help customers solve business issues and get results. Buyers expect business conversations, not product catalogs.

Delivering value depends on efficiently executing three motions:

Pre-sale awareness
A consideration that leads to a sale
Post-sale service and support

Today’s buyer expects a frictionless hand-off between each stage with minimal complexity to realize the promised value. By bringing these three motions together in an exceptional way, companies are rethinking the roles of Marketing, Sales and Service.

Pre-sale: Solution Marketing Raises Awareness

A solution marketing approach requires knowing where your ideal buyer hunts for information while providing proof of solutions across multiple channels. A precision marketing approach identifies where buyers go for trusted information, including websites, social media, industry forums and user sites.

Digital channels are more important than ever, with 89% of companies investing in digital outreach to capture the buyer’s attention that shapes their opinion. Deep analytics refines segmentation and messaging to engage buyers in a meaningful way before the sales discussion. Today’s marketing function is more accountable for results, emerging as true partners with sales while sharing the responsibility for revenue objectives.

“Everyone is in sales, regardless of what team you’re on. That responsiveness and expectations are the same across the board. Everyone is part of the customer’s buyer journey.” – Renae Leary, Chief Commercial Officer, Americas, Ansell Healthcare

Sales: Investing in Virtual Resources and Tools

In the next chapter, sales headcount is heading up.

The sales motion begins when the buyer is ready to consider a purchase. Today’s selling stage is a hybrid mix of onsite, events and virtual interactions, requiring sellers to adapt their tactics to each selling environment. Live events are down 50%, reducing travel costs and time commitments, allowing sales leaders to redirect funds to revenue-producing, high-value engagements.

“When a company transitions to a subscription model, they have 4-6 years. We only had five quarters. COVID created a challenge for acquiring new customers. We didn’t have face-to-face interaction. We all had Zoom fatigue. We needed to spend more time with our current customers and give them more value. We put a lot of investment in that in our marketing and sales in a holistic way.” Guy Melamed, CFO and Chief Operating Officer, Varonis

Just as precision marketing targets where the customer lives in the virtual environment, sellers must engage according to buyer preferences or risk exclusion. Organizations must know how each buyer prefers to engage with sellers and create the setting for the value-driven conversation. Alexander Group’s research shows that firms now invest in a hybrid headcount, with 89% investing in virtual sales resources and tools.

Post-sale Support: Service Investments Enable Success

Our research indicates that 80% of companies transform post-sale operations from break-fix to proactive service, enabled by investments in digital technology. Companies are transforming their break-fix service function into engines that drive both customer success and ongoing relationships.

In addition, two-thirds of companies show significant increases in virtual resources dedicated to customer outreach after the sale, focusing on tracking customer usage that targets interventions that improve adoption and results.

Building an ecosystem that includes pre-sales, sales and post-sales motions requires leadership and teamwork across the organization, delivering an exceptional customer experience from initial dialogue to adoption.

“I believe an optimal way to make a good Customer Success footprint is making sure customers get value and achieve their ROI objective and building out the renewals motion that allows us to have conversations for our value piece. I’m responsible for customer experience groups like community events, mind share programs, peer-to-peer sharing, voice of customers in products, etc. These tie nicely to the Customer Success motion from before the sale to well after.” Teresa Anania, SVP, Global Customer Success and Renewals, Zendesk

Delivering Value Is a 24X7 Job

Growing revenue requires serving today’s 24X7 customer before, during and after the sale with consistent motions that deliver value. To prepare your organization, get the answers, and take away actionable insights you can leverage at the Alexander Group’s 2022 Forum Series: Enduring Leadership.