In today’s environment, businesses move faster than ever. This makes aspects such as simple interdepartmental communication within any organization extremely important—but increasingly overlooked. Things that get missed can be simple items such as an interdepartmental understanding of how new customers are interacting with your various teams and solutions. But why does this matter, you ask? Let’s say Sales brings on a new “unique” client. This client has been following your organization for quite some time and realized they can use your solution to solve a “very unique” problem they have. Fast forward a few months, and this client with a “unique” use-case of your solution is producing results that are off the charts, along with seeing exponential gains in revenue. This is great, right? Well, not so much… Here’s the problem: when Sales brought on this new client, no one communicated to the greater organization how they found out about your solutions. This means Marketing has no idea which activities are bringing new successful clients to the table. Furthermore, what if this client’s “unique” use of your solution isn’t so unique? What if their problem is a wide-spread problem for their industry as a whole, and your solution now has a proven record for solving that problem? Well again, because no one communicated or tracked information about your new client, no one would know to keep tabs on their performance, and furthermore, no one would know that that your solution is a silver bullet for an entire industry. This would be a huge missed opportunity for any business, and unfortunately, it happens all too often. Businesses move at the speed of light these days, and as a result, things like customer tracking and internal communication are directly affected. In this article, we’ll cover some tips and tricks for improving customer tracking and internal communication, along with how to take advantage of that information to help almost every department within your business today.
Again, the example shared above is not uncommon, as once a product is officially sent to market and Sales starts selling, there is little to no tracking or communication shared between departments. Typically, if a business conducts any tracking, it is extremely siloed to individual departments. In some cases, Marketing might track how many campaigns are running and the number of leads generated, Sales might track opportunities and closed deals, and Support might track the number of support calls taken. This information is extremely valuable for each department, but when siloed, it hinders an organization from having a true end-to-end visibility of a business. The result is missing critical information that can reveal vital information to the real performance of marketing campaigns, success of sales tactics, deeper understanding of what truly makes a successful customer, or an awareness of new business possibilities. This can all hinder the growth and performance of any business… Below, we’ve shared a few tactics for closing the interdepartmental communication gap and taking advantage of insight gained to help any business grow.
Prospect to customer lifecycle tracking – Again, we see elements such as Marketing tracking campaign efficiency or Sales tracking opportunities to closed deals, and other departmental metrics. All of these elements are a start, but typically limited to their respective departments, however, equally important to find ways to integrate these tracking methods for a full custom lifecycle view. Why is this important? Because no customer is equal. Meaning, there are some customers that will become exceptional role models, utilizing your solution to its greatest potential. As a result, they have a higher likelihood to upgrade, renew, and recommend new customers. On the other hand, you have customers that have the greatest intensions for purchasing your solution, but after buying, have little to no actual use, and as result, are less likely to upgrade, renew, or recommend new customers…. These situations and everything in between play out within every business. However, without proper customer lifecycle tracking, it makes it almost impossible to find out what truly makes exceptional customers and all of the elements that got them to the point they are at today.
Reporting – Along with actual tracking, it is important to build out reports that can begin to quantify specific metrics across the board. Creating a reporting structure with a complete lifecycle view can reveal information that one could not glean from a siloed reporting structure. Say for example, your marketing team is reviewing their campaign metrics and find one campaign that is driving 4x the leads of any other campaign, and those leads convert to sales at a rate of 50%, which is at least double the performance of any other marketing campaign. This is all great, right? Now, let’s say those customers typically spend 25% less than any other customer and churn within 60 days at a rate 75% faster than any other customer. Then, the reality is that campaign may be bringing in customers at a faster clip than any other marketing campaign, but they spend less and leave exponentially faster than any other campaign, and really is a loss leader. At the surface, the campaign is a winner, but pealing back the layers shares a completely different tale.
Another element of reporting that we find equally important is how these reports are distributed… Some companies may be tempted to only share with executive leadership or departmental heads. We recommend against this and suggest sharing with the greater team. Not only does it give the greater team an idea of the performance of the organization, but if you hired right, you have smart people on your team. Distributing the report to the greater team gets more eyeballs reviewing the data and the ability to provide more educated insight.
Assumptions and testing – As reporting data comes in, you’ll begin to see trends in the data revealing interesting information. Going back to one of the examples above, what really makes a good customer successful? Well, analyzing the data should reveal some interesting things… Customers might be successful because of the way they were onboarded to your solution, or maybe they are utilizing a tool within your solution that is helping them become successful. Whatever the data shows, it is important to start to make assumptions on what the data is telling you. Example: After reviewing the data, there is an assumption that customers that go through a specific onboarding training process and use a specific element of your solution tend to be 20% more productive… That’s one assumption that can be gleaned from the data, making the next step testing that assumption by developing a plan to send more customers through that specific onboarding process and find ways to get them to leverage that part of the tool… At the end of the day, sometimes bad customers are not really bad customers, they just need proper guidance.
Interdepartmental meetings – Not sure about you, but we are not the biggest fans of sitting through weekly pipeline or operational review meetings. Let’s face it, no one really is. However, people do love to talk about their experiences and successes… This is why we recommend setting up recurring interdepartmental meetings to review the happenings in each department: good, bad, or indifferent. The goal of these meetings is to truly help break down the siloed departmental walls that live in most companies and get information shared. Believe it or not, Marketing does want to know about the success that Sales is having and why. Also, Sales is really interested in finding out how customers have been performing and learning about new product development. Again, the goal of these meetings is to share important information around how each department is functioning so that they know how to adjust their own plans accordingly.
Announcement emails – Sure, no one wants more email to clutter up their inboxes. However, when Sales is announcing a new customer win, people want to know. Not only do people want to know about a win, they want to know the who, what, when, where, and how of the new customer win. This gives different departments a deeper understanding of their function within an organization and the successes they are contributing to. This is also the opportunity to flag things such as unique use-cases or tactics that brought in these new customers… Again, going back to the example at the start of the article, identifying this information via announcement emails gives other departments a heads up that they need to pay special attention to this customer. Then, via tracking and reporting, you can identify how this customer is performing… If interesting data begins to emerge, this can be the opportunity to share it in the interdepartmental meetings for others to be aware.
Battle cards – Finally, as the various teams start connecting the dots, there will be some clear indications to tactics and use-case examples for successful clients. This is great, but let’s not forget that people are bombarded by information on a daily basis and no matter how important the information, it can be forgotten. This is where we recommend creating battle cards…. A battle card is essentially an overview of successful tactics or use-cases that can be referred to on the fly by reps within the various departments. These battle cards are a key element to help various departments not forget what makes customers successful and find ways of replicating that success in their daily activities.
We all move at the speed of light these days, and by simply not finding ways to share information between the various departments, it is leaving significant amounts of opportunity for organization growth on the table! Developing a strategy of any type around these elements is going to take time as you are working towards a fundamental change of how we do business today.