Best practices for B2B software startups
The power of customer obsession
Forrester: Align Around Your Customers To Power Growth In Today’s Economic Climate
This article is brought to you by Forrester, a leading global market research company. Contact details and a link to their website can be found under the article.
Most business leaders have bought into the concept of customer obsession. But in an uncertain economic climate, plans to operationalize it can slide. That’s a critical error: Centering leadership, strategy, and operations on customers — the very definition of customer obsession — is precisely what will help thrive. Aligning customer-facing and technology functions around customer value — building your customer-obsessed growth engine — is foundational to driving consistent growth, profit, and retention. When internal stakeholders and functions fly in formation, everything moves faster — including the growth curve. Firms with high levels of alignment across their customer-facing functions reported 2.4 times higher revenue growth and twice the profitability growth of those with no alignment in a recent Forrester survey.
Pursue The Right Kind Of Alignment
Most business leaders recognize the value of alignment. But not all forms of alignment lead to competitive growth. Aligning teams around internally focused constructs, for instance, can result in inefficient processes and irrelevant goals and metrics. To power your growth engine, a shared focus on customer value must be the starting point.
Each team has its own valuable and unique perspective on the customer — so bring teams together to build a collective understanding of customers, create new ways to deliver value, and lean on each other’s strengths to move faster.
Our new customer-obsessed growth engine research explains where to begin this work:
- In B2B organizations, fully aligned marketing, product and sales teams can supercharge customer-obsessed growth and deftly navigate complex buyer dynamics. B2B marketing leaders are steeped in buyer needs and likely have the best understanding of the full customer lifecycle. Sellers know which opportunities they’re winning and how they’re helping the buyer purchase. And product teams are continually solving problems and identifying future unmet needs that can spark future sources of value.
- In B2C companies, the marketing, customer experience (CX), and digital functions are the power trio. B2C marketing leaders create brand experiences that inspire devotion through intimate customer knowledge, while well-functioning CX programs improve customer experiences through voice-of-the-customer research and inclusive design. Digital teams focus on core digital products, services, and sales — and can set the pace of the growth engine by connecting and maturing digital skills and processes across the collective team.
- Technology leadership, architecture, delivery, and security teams also play a critical role. Working in concert with customer-facing teams, they can magnify impact by aligning to quickly meet future customer needs with adaptivity, creativity, and resilience. Firms that have reset their tech strategy to be customer-obsessed see higher revenue growth than those that don’t, Forrester’s 2022 data shows.
Clients can read our full overview report and our B2B and B2C reports to learn more about what it takes to build, run, and continually optimize a customer-obsessed growth engine. Use these resources as a guide to position your company to thrive — both through the current economic uncertainty and beyond.
Forrester: Aligning Around The Customer Will Turbocharge Companies’ Growth Engines
Forrester is a trusted partner to its clients to help them future-proof their business strategy, fend off disruptors, and grow faster. To drive profitable and sustainable business growth in this environment, alignment across sales, marketing, and product in B2B firms and across marketing, customer experience (CX), and digital in B2C firms is critical to powering a customer-obsessed growth engine. Additionally, technology teams need to be in lockstep to quickly address changing customer needs and market realities.
The Forrester Decisions portfolio is designed to help clients grow faster through customer obsession. It will enable companies to build differentiated digital experiences and align their product, marketing, and sales efforts to win, serve, and retain more customers than their competitors. While the pandemic pushed many firms to digitize their offerings, only a small number of senior decision-makers rate their firms as digitally advanced — 29% in Asia Pacific, 22% in North America, and 15% in Europe. Forrester helps executives, functional leaders, and their teams — across technology, customer experience, B2C and B2B marketing, sales, and product management — plan and tackle their most pressing initiatives and priorities for driving growth. What are the attributes of a first-class industry analyst relations (AR) professional running a first-class AR program? Forrester visualizes the peak of AR by showing how different it is from commonplace AR and helps to determine significant areas where the top performers differ from peers — business value, management of AR design and execution, influence over analysts, AR investment, and professional recognition — and analyzes each to show clients where to begin on the journey toward such professional AR excellence.
Forrester helps business and technology leaders use customer obsession to accelerate growth. That means empowering you to put the customer at the center of everything you do: your leadership, strategy, and operations. Becoming a customer-obsessed organization requires change — it requires being bold. We give business and technology leaders the confidence to put bold into action, shaping and guiding how to navigate today’s unprecedented change in order to succeed.