How do you measure customer satisfaction?
Customer Effort Score—the amount of effort a customer exerts to, for instance, fulfill a request—is a point-in-time score that’s a very simple way to get more engagement and feedback. If you take a step back as a B2B company, you want more of your customers to tell you how they feel. Surveys are onerous, but if you can make it simple and meaningful—during or after moments that matter—you can gauge a general sentiment. In the case of net promoter scores, a 200-point scoring mechanism that takes a long time to administer to very small sample sizes is great for certain things. But a Customer Effort Score during moments that matter allows you to get a very quick pulse of how your customers feel in the moment, then dive in and actually improve those moments in a very agile fashion.
Did you make any internal changes?
We’ve decided to have a finite set of metrics where everyone is beholden to five key objectives or goals. Every single person on the team, contractors included, have subgoals that ladder up to the broader goals. You typically see B2B organizations, especially ones that have been around for 15 to 20 years, take a very traditional stance on marketing: Marketing helps with pictures, fonts, and logos, but doesn't add value from a business standpoint—so show me the numbers. Building trust is required to make sure that the opportunities we create are opportunities at the business. We have metrics that show how we brought this opportunity in, how it closed, and its value.
How has this helped achieve sales and marketing alignment?
I would rather lay claim to three things than 3.1 million things. I want to be able to say that, if we hadn't existed, they wouldn't have been delivered. That is true incremental value. That’s where we’re placing a lot of our emphasis—on the marketing sourced pipe and the shared number for opportunity we create. There's recognition in the company that the influenced component from a marketing standpoint does add value, but we're not going to put that on a financial metric. We drive that as marketers, but we really focus on the marketing sourced pipe, making sure that if it's created and handed over to sales that something's going to be done with it in a timely manner.
How do you test these non-traditional approaches to business?
It seems counterintuitive, but we’ve got a coalition of the willing working on a certain initiative right now. We’re testing this theory where, if we use data with 14 sellers to more effectively predict where they should focus their accounts, then they will close deals faster and those deals will be bigger. When you start to see, as a seller, other people around you that are, like you, retiring quota faster, getting to club faster, and closing bigger deals, that becomes a massive motivator to be interested in what they’re doing. That’s an instance where we could have forced everybody to drive these data-driven approaches or taken 14 people to do it among hundreds. I think, in the end, we’ll end up seeing bigger impact and bigger uptake of these approaches by having started small and going big.