Growth at all costs dominated the technology sector for years, followed by a period defined by reducing spend and scaling back. Now ambition is rearing its head again and businesses are moving forward with reinvigorated goals.
Faced with ambitious targets, revenue leaders may be tempted to revert to familiar strategies – but money is no longer free, and what worked then won’t work now.
Customer journeys have become increasingly complex. Following an explosion in go-to-market (GTM) technologies over the past decade, an era defined by Gartner as “tech mayhem,” companies cobbled together tech stacks and inevitably created cracks. Siloed data, misalignment, messy hand-offs, and an incomplete customer picture amount to a poor customer experience. BCG estimates these GTM inefficiencies cost businesses a staggering $2 trillion in wasted costs and revenue potential.
This is waste companies cannot afford in 2024. Revenue growth today demands a radical shift – a system designed for efficiently winning and retaining not just any customer, but your higher value customers. The key lies in unifying your go-to-market function, so that you can put every customer on a personalized journey.
Why Personalized Journeys are Paramount
Customers aren’t numbers. They’re people, and people need to feel valued. This concept has informed GTM strategies for years and driven the invention of hundreds of tools designed to enhance the customer experience. What’s curious is that despite the intensive focus, these efforts are still missing the mark.
Buyers are becoming desensitized to personalization attempts. Think about your own experience – how many times have you looked at a product online and gotten barraged with ads and emails for that product without any context? Personalization is rampant to the point that it starts to feel generic, and even disturbing. Companies need to find the “sweet spot” between sterile outreach and over-the-top quasi-personalization. Where we go wrong is inundating buyers with content, when really, it’s about the journey. At the core of true personalization is a deep understanding of your customer, so that you can accurately anticipate where they are in their journey and where they want to go and help them get there.
Consider how Spotify developed customer journey mapping to enhance music sharing. They conducted research and surveys to get insights into user motivations, pain points, and preferences. Then, they used this data to create personas and construct a journey, and finally make product enhancements to improve the process.
Source: Woopra, 7 Interesting Real-Life Customer Journey Map Examples
So, how can you take a page from this playbook? It starts with achieving a comprehensive understanding of your customer – and for that you need data.
Three Steps to Building a Complete the Customer Picture
Data fragmentation is a huge problem today. With marketing, sales, and customer success operating independently, your customer data is locked away across disparate tools and processes. This means your teams are flying half blind. It also means you lose a customer’s history as soon as they disappear down a different funnel. What we want to get to is data unification – where you bring together all the data to complete the customer picture, make that picture accessible to all teams, and send every lead on a personalized path.
By taking the following three steps, we’re already seeing great results at Typeform. These success metrics include a 40 percent increase in lead quality, 75 percent increase in opportunities, and surpassing our numbers for sales-assisted new business compared to 2023.
Step 1: Unite your GTM team
Traditionally, alignment has been the North Star. While simple in theory, alignment is hard in practice. It requires a continuous dedication to maintenance, constant reinvention as your business scales. Your teams may stay in sync temporarily, but in a rapidly changing business landscape it’s only a matter of time before the rhythm is interrupted.
The industry has started waking up to a simpler solution – bringing your teams together under one revenue roof. A single, unified GTM team is not only poised to adapt with agility but is marching toward common goals with shared resources and ways of working. At Typeform, we solved this by putting all teams under the Chief Revenue Officer, with processes managed and streamlined by RevOps, allowing for greater efficiency and optimized budget.
Step 2: Build a customer-first tech stack
Just as important as your team is the tooling that empowers them. Up until recently, the tools and technology integrations weren’t available to support a singular GTM tech stack. Most organizations have a CRM in place and may have some centralized view of their data through a reporting tool, but the challenge is acting on it – there’s no standardized flow for all the leads to go through for enrichment, scoring, and routing. So, you end up with multiple tools doing different things, and the stack gets very complex and fragmented.
Now, for the first-time vendors are beginning to transform their technology to support a unified tech stack. The new unified funnel works like this: You start by gathering data. Integrate your data streams, so you can see all customer interaction points at the top of the funnel, enabling you to better understand them. Once responses are collected from each individual, the data undergoes scoring and enrichment processes with a dedicated tool. Finally, the scored and enriched data is then routed to appropriate systems or conversations based on predetermined criteria, also using a dedicated tool – this could involve directing leads to sales teams, support teams, nurturing campaigns, or in-product messaging.
Step 3: Complete the customer picture
So, you’ve built a tech stack capable of routing customers to the best place suited for their needs, based on comprehensive, connected data – but the thing is you need enough raw data to work with. 2024 is posing challenges for marketers – between the increasing privacy regulations and Google’s deprecation of third-party cookies, data is getting harder to get.
What companies can do is collect data straight from the source – your customers – through forms, surveys, and quizzes. This is called zero-party data. Zero-party data is a critical piece of the puzzle when it comes to understanding your customer. When you rely purely on observed data, you may have a lot of information about what is happening – but what you don’t know is why. By gathering both observed data and zero party data, you can draw a line to connect the dots – giving you both the context and the capacity to reach insights that are informed, not just inferred.
Ultimately, by bringing together all of this data, you’re creating a profile that will follow your customer wherever they go. Think of it like a medical record that follows you from office to office. With a unified team, a unified tech stack, and comprehensive customer profiles, you’ll understand your customers like never before – empowering you to put them on the right journey.
It’s the Journey, Not the Destination
You can have an amazing product, but if your prospects get lost on their journey to becoming a customer, your company will fail to grow. By prioritizing customer experience, and helping customers get from A to B the result can be different. The reality is 80 percent of customers now consider their experience with a company to be as important as its products, according to Salesforce.
The key is to unlock the data across your teams and tools, so you can use that data to holistically understand your customers at greater depth. Only then can you seamlessly and instantaneously engage and guide them in a helpful, human way.
The author, Joaquim (Kim) Lecha, is CEO of Typeform.