Every existing customer in your business is also a potential future customer. In fact, they are arguably your most important potential customers — listen and learn from them, nurture and delight them. Soon, you’ll have a revenue engine humming with an ongoing, evolving base of advocates and repeat clients.
One of our recent blog posts talked about Demand Expansion: the “unsung hero” of revenue growth for marketing and sales teams. Demand Expansion is retaining and expanding a customer’s lifetime value and opening new advocacy opportunities. Since 90% of a customer’s lifetime value is generated in the months and years after their initial purchase, your organization’s revenue depends on the relationship you build with customers long after that first sale. It’s crucial that sales, marketing and customer success teams have a clear and shared understanding of the customer journey. From there they can align their strategies to build relationships and deliver value, leading to long-term demand — and revenue — expansion.
Customer relationships grow and build in stages, from initial interactions with your brand to the first purchase, onboarding and adoption, exposure to your suite of products and services, and into loyalty and advocacy. For this important relationship to progress, you need to continue talking and listening to your customers so you can better understand what they need and how their business operates. Work with them early on to help them see immediate and measurable value from using your product or service. Coordinate marketing, sales and support teams’ efforts so they don’t confuse or annoy customers with inconsistent or redundant communication. Then you can get to expansion, in which you use your increasing insights and observations to introduce other products and services, possibly bringing to your customer capabilities and advantages they may not have even known they needed.
First Successes First
In the broadest sense, whatever you did to attract customers to their first purchase is what you must continue doing to keep and grow them over time. But you can’t immediately leap from the first sale to pushing the next great thing. First, you need to make sure they’ve had success with their initial purchase.
When a customer buys your product or service (and not some other company’s offering), they’ve taken a risk — or at least, they may feel they’ve taken a risk. The first thing they want to do is demonstrate throughout their organization that they made the right decision. This means your first job is to make sure they recognize that success. Marketing, sales and customer success teams work together to give customers the support and guidance they need to ramp up quickly and see value from their purchase.
Next, connect them with other customer success stories. In fact, introducing new customers to your larger user community is an extremely powerful tool. Help your customers see and learn from other implementations, and provide them a forum to showcase their own use and mastery of your offerings. These peer-sharing opportunities help build confidence in their purchase and provide exposure to your other products and services — when your customers become your advocates, they become a great marketing channel for you!
Build a 360-Degree View of the Customer Within Your Organization
While there are many groups within your organization who interact with customers, each has a different perspective. All your customer-facing teams — customer experience, marketing, sales — have different forms of communication with, and views of, your customer. To really understand where the opportunities for Demand Expansion may lie, collect and sync those different perspectives to develop a full 360-degree view of your customer. Gather your customer-facing teams together to share their viewpoints and knowledge, then look for opportunities to deepen and expand your customer relationships based on this new, more holistic view.
Share a Coherent, Broad Product Narrative
Customers initially may buy a single product or service, but to expand the relationship, you must help them recognize where additional solutions your organization provides can address their business needs and goals. Customers may be motivated to learn more when they understand what problems your ecosystem of products and services can solve. Connecting the dots between their needs and your offerings establishes you as a proactive supporter of your customer’s success, which ultimately strengthens the trust in the relationship.
Create a cohesive, overarching narrative of products and capabilities, and make sure all communications consistently fit within that narrative. This goes for all types of messaging, from public-facing awareness content to direct communications from your marketing and support teams. For example, be sure marketing isn’t sending product information while customer care is providing similar information described in a different way, which can confuse the customer and disrupt the relationship.
Build Your Knowledge To Expand Demand
You should become an increasingly valuable business advisor and resource for your customer over time. As your relationship evolves, you can learn from their actions — how they use your products, what community opportunities they participate in, how they engage with your content — and you also can ask questions more directly. With the knowledge you gain, you can delve that much deeper into the details of their organization — their needs, concerns, and goals — so you can offer better guidance where and when they need it.
For effective Demand Expansion, a great marketing organization can do something even more valuable than meeting customer needs: You can give them abilities they didn’t know they were lacking. After all, you know the capabilities of products your customer hasn’t yet acquired, and you’ve grown to know their business goals. This puts you in a trusted position to recommend other products or services that might provide value for them.
Seeking the Happy Customer
It’s been said that you can’t out-market unhappy customers. Demand Expansion only works if your customers are satisfied — or better yet, ecstatic! Successful marketers build relationships with their customers based on communication — not just talking and listening, but truly understanding their business. Build your customer relationships product by product over time, showing value every step of the way. Help them onboard and adopt your products. Bring them into the community of users to see the full capabilities of what you can do for them. Give them opportunities to showcase their successes and advocacy of your products or services. Once they’ve mastered use of your products and have seen concrete, positive change, that’s when you’ve built the foundation to extend the relationship and drive Demand Expansion, turning first-time customers into lifetime customers.
Leverage the Power of BDO Digital
If you need some assistance with developing your buyer personas, mapping your customer journeys, building out your customer segments, or cleaning up your data, we offer a variety of services that can get you where you need to be. Contact us today to learn how BDO Digital can help!
Sophie Julien O’Neal is a seasoned professional with more than 25 years of experience in capacity building, B2B and B2C marketing strategy and operations, data-driven customer acquisition and expansion, business process improvement, organizational effectiveness and change management. As a Senior Consultant with BDO Digital’s Demand Generation Group, she helps to bridge silos and reveal synergies between business and technology by providing both strategic and hands-on guidance for successful marketing and technology initiatives.
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