Analyzing and making sense of your progress in marketing takes a little patience and focus. Here are 3 key avenues to take.
Start with Sales
The first group you should collaborate with is sales, which comprises account managers, sales operations, outside sales, inside sales, business development representatives (BDR), and outside sales. You will be able to sketch the whole customer life cycle, including net new acquisition and account expansion, if you have representation from each of these important sales divisions. Sales representatives can supply information on how a customer acts during the purchasing process, account managers can provide information on the behaviors of existing customers, and the BDR team can offer insights on when and how new prospects engage. Sales operations is needed for this meeting so they can start thinking about the technology and tools needed to support the new customer’s journey. Internal validation with a larger group of the sales team is the next stage. Here, you will be verifying both above-the-line (a customer’s opinion) and below-the-line (your own actions) operations. This achieves the following two goals: Including more salespeople increases their sense of inclusion and increases their likelihood of accepting adjustments as the project develops. It gives you other details on the map as well.
Communication!
You must develop an above-the-line version that you can distribute to customers after you have finalized all of the input from all of the companies that interact with customers. Make sure you have a solid set of interview questions, and that each person who interviews a customer utilizes the exact same set. Marketing should conduct this interview. Conducting ongoing conversations and interviews with your prospects and consumers can provide you with the best insights into managing your marketing. This is an excellent educational exercise.
Customer Functions
Much like the sales team process, meet with these groups, show them the map and gather their input. Be careful to define the layers and separate above-the-line and below-the-line activities. Most often groups such as customer success, customer support and services as key to this step in the process. Your customer success and customer support team are often full of information about customers. They can often provide insights into what new customers need.
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