Missing in Action: Insights
Your success team is interfacing with customers every single day. They are deeply familiar with what's working with your product - and what's not - and know which pain-points need immediate attention. Their customer retention targets and strategies are closely aligned across your teams: Product, Marketing, and Sales. This allows gaps to be quickly noticed and filled.
Product has one eye on the roadmap and the other on utilization and support cases, looking for those gaps and prioritizing for the next sprint. In regular syncs with peers in Marketing, Sales, and Success, they’re leading insight collaboration sessions, and fanning back out into the ecosystem to address pain points and build on strengths.
Marketing is laser focused on the top of the funnel, both for net new and retention goals, but also watching structured and unstructured data like a hawk. The other functional areas rely on Marketing to surface hot topics, competitive trends, and opportunity potential, for prospects and customers alike.
And Sales - is there any team with better 1:1 insights from prospects or customers of all shapes and sizes? Sales folks hear it all in structured and unstructured conversations while handling prospect and customer accounts all day long. Watching the trends of conversations, Sales regularly gathers all the rich insights they receive, and feeds it back to the other functional areas, so their peers can react accordingly.
The result when functional areas share and collaborate? Sticky, happy customers. Prospects who are intrigued and quick to buy. Uber-fast problem resolution. And leapfrogging the competition with solutions the market has whispered to you from upstream.
Happy days, right?
Well one day, perhaps.
This is more likely your scenario today.
Product: Your Product team just did a UX study on part of your platform. Do you know the size of the study or if it was a representative sample? Why did they do *this* particular study? Do you know what impact it will have on the roadmap? Did they share the positives, negatives, neutrals? Did they share the results with Marketing, Sales, or Success? Did they confer on how their results align with what the other functional areas are observing?
Sales: Your Sales team has just been through a fairly robust Account Planning exercise. They’ve identified key players, pain points, and any notable differences by seniority or business unit. Did they share those results with Product, Marketing, or Success? Did they validate their instincts with the other functional areas? Have they aligned with Marketing on addressing pain points and developing key messages?
Success: Your Success team is often the first point of contact for your customers, especially if problems have arisen. They deal directly with customers every day. They have targets for retention; do they also have strategies for retention? Do you know what those targets and strategies are? Do their targets and strategies align with Product, Marketing, and Sales’ targets and strategies? Are there gaps? When Success team members start to see trends in the market, do they track positive or negative trends? Do they discuss them as a group? Better still, do they discuss them with Product, Marketing, and Sales?
Marketing: Your Marketing team is likely monitoring google analytics, social media reach and related data, and other insights - are they sharing those results with Product, Sales, and Success teams? Is there any time spent discussing how the insights gleaned align (or don’t!) with Product, Sales, and Success’ insights? Is Marketing making decisions that are verified against the other functional area goals?
Let’s go further.
Your Marketing and Sales teams are attending a major industry event (remember major industry events?). Besides coordinating meetings with clients and prospects, who’s manning the booth, and/or scanning badges: What happens to the potential leads gathered, post-event? Did the teams debrief after the event to share captured insights? If so, did they share those insights with Product or Success? And, how does your organization capture these insights, beyond ad hoc, to determine if they’re statistically meaningful?
Your Exec and Product team just hosted a boutique Executive Roundtable. Fifteen C level customers and prospects attended. What feedback was gathered there? Were insights shared with the rest of the organization? Was there a meeting to share information or an action plan in place to scale for Product, Marketing, Sales, or Success?
If you’re like your peers around the world, these questions about the meaningful insights sprinkled all around us - if only we would harness them - might be worrisome and/or inspiring. Hopefully both!
In B2B, every functional area has insights the other functional areas need. Desperately. However, as I speak with Product, Marketing, Sales, and Success leaders around the world, they often express embarrassment about how poorly they and their teams collaborate across functional areas. “Ah, yeah. No, we don’t do that. We definitely should do that.”
“I Thought it Was Just Me”
I do quite a bit of writing and speaking about how B2B reality differs from the nonsense spewed by (charlatans) thought leaders. From AdWeek London to numerous B2B Marketing events to a recent panel hosted by Twitter and Sprinklr, my message is largely the same: The Content Cabal and the Tech Founder ecosystem are so busy turning the volume up to eleven on a message that *works for them* - about hustling, hacking, and killing it - that people everywhere think that’s the single version of the truth. If *you’re* not killing it, I mean, pick up your toys and go home, right? So everyone claims to be killing it.
Pssst. Everyone’s not killing it.
In particular, when I’m presenting to Marketing orgs in the U.S. and Europe about the dismal state of the MarTech stack and the resultant barrier created when it comes to mining for useful insights, person after person approaches me afterwards and *quietly* says “Omg. We thought we were the only ones with this issue!”
They’re not the only ones. You’re not the only one.
I am here to tell you, as much as the Silicon Valley hustle model encourages mouthy folks in the market to talk about how they’re “Totally slaying, man!” the real facts show...few are actually slaying. Most are struggling.
Our legacy systems and structures are the opposite of what we need, if we’re hoping to meaningfully and effectively harness important data and insights.
The reality is most companies don’t have any human or tech structure for consistently sharing those insights. Sure, Sales shares pipeline information. Product may share a roadmap a couple times a year. Marketing likely shares the funnel data. But are the other functional areas acting on it? Just how valuable IS data, if not compared to other functional area insights? And, are any of these tied to strategic objectives?
Wouldn’t it be great to know what prospects and customers are sharing, 1:1? All the great offline, unstructured data Sales & Success receive from prospects and customers? Every phone call, meeting, dinner, hallway conversation? What about all the great unstructured data and insights that live in the digital space, on social channels and other public forums?
Gosh, if we could capture and harness those insights - how different our trajectories would be.
Might we see connections between what we’re hearing from customers and the market, and what we’re seeing in product utilization or support calls?
What is the cost for organizations who don’t capture these insights? Organizations where key functional areas don’t regularly collaborate via a structured feedback loop?
Most importantly, what is the upside for organizations who are first to mine this untapped insight goldmine?
How much better would we all be if we were regularly gathering, structuring, sharing, and collaborating on insights? Worth considering, isn’t it?
Nicole France, Evangelist at Contentful; formerly VP and Principal Analyst, Constellation Research (coverage areas)
Three of the many reasons I’m a Nicole France fan:
Her piece "What Joe Coulombe Is Still Teaching Us About Customer Experience" would be a great discussion topic for your next team meeting. The key takeaways for me:
Carrying on with those themes, I’m spotlighting this publication: "From Transactions to Customers: Finding people in the data.” While you’d have to be a Constellation client (do it!) to read the whole piece yourself, it’s worth highlighting these takeaways:
Connect with Nicole on LinkedIn or twitter . You’ll be glad you did.
