How to un-silo your organization and be more customer-centric

Organizations often claim to be customer-centric. However, the reality frequently falls short of this. Many companies operate with rigid boundaries between the marketing, sales and customer success departments. This creates artificial barriers that negatively impact customer satisfaction and the company’s bottom line. 

The hidden cost of boundaries: Why siloed teams hurt revenue and customer satisfaction

Putting boundaries between marketing, sales and customer success in your business could cost you money and lower customer satisfaction. Clear ownership is essential for getting things done efficiently and effectively. However, hard lines between functional groups create artificial barriers for customers and depress lifetime value and renewal.

In most SaaS and B2B organizations, silos exist for practical reasons. Budgets are held in functional areas and data is collected in discrete systems that don’t talk to each other. For example:

• Marketing is responsible for attracting prospects to the top of the funnel and is sometimes measured on converted revenue. Robust martech stacks support marketing and are barely used outside of marketing team goals. 
• Sales is in charge of closing opportunities — and sometimes in charge of renewals. More sales tech is maintained through the sales cycle, and the data integration between marketing and sales can be inconsistent. 
• Customer success (which comes in many flavors, from customer service to account management), is in charge of customer satisfaction and sometimes renewal. Often, customer feedback and service data are not shared widely. 
• Product management is in charge of anticipating and meeting customer’s emerging needs. 
• UX/UI is in charge of making life easier for customers.

You can see how the roles and responsibilities overlap and blend, and customer data gets replicated in different systems across the lifecycle. Those porous boundaries are often a source of tension for attribution and reporting. However, if we operate in a truly customer-centric organization, they can instead be a source of collaboration and opportunity. 

Internal silos restrict understanding of customers

Everyone in our model above is involved in understanding customers, which is wonderful. That shared knowledge is essential for building trust, loyal fans and higher retention. A previous column showcased seven content strategies for using martech insight and talent to upsell and engage customers. Here are three customer journey practices for tapping this institutional, cross-functional wisdom.

• Implement a cross-functional voice of the customer (VOC) program to gather and sort input for shared understanding. 
• Connect functional groups and leverage talent and technology via shared goals and connected data. The alternative is that the skills and data used along the full customer journey often stay siloed because everyone has siloed goals. 
• When many people are responsible for upselling and cross-selling, the customer can be, at best, confused and, at worst, feel badgered by multiple people from the same company. 

Dig deeper: 5 secrets to cross-functional collaboration in marketing

Cross-functional VOC programs give the customer a seat at the table

Go-to-market strategies, especially in marketing, often fall victim to magpie syndrome. The last person the executive or sales lead spoke to suddenly holds all the influence. Instead, we need a reliable system to bring the customer’s voice to the table, revealing common themes and validating individual feedback. While many collect customer input, someone should filter, organize and prioritize it to turn feedback into actionable insights for testing, messaging and product improvement.

A VOC feedback loop should be a cross-functional collaboration owned by the customer success team and include people from product, marketing, sales, UX, data analytics, operations and leadership. 

The goal is to automate feedback collection and segment the feedback based on predefined criteria (e.g., customer persona, product feature, sentiment). Collect this feedback in your CRM so it can be used and rules can be applied for priority action (e.g., executive outreach or sales engagement). 

From that data, create a feedback dashboard to be shared widely and used by all departments in their work. This helps keep personas from becoming stale on the shelf and makes VOC a contributor for everyone trying to improve performance or launch a new product or campaign. 

I’ve found that assigning an owner to work on a cross-functional team to keep the dashboard relevant and accurate is a great way to build trust across the organization. Often, this role is rotated so that everyone can participate more deeply, building a customer-centric culture. 

Shared goals between marketing, sales and product teams accelerate results

Everyone invokes the customer in decision-making. But it’s often like the parable of the five blind men and the elephant: each functional area uses a different set of customer insight and expertise. Marketing knowledge is used at the top of the funnel, UX is used heavily during onboarding and customer service is used to reduce costs. 

Smart companies borrow heavily from practices and automation technology at all parts of the journey to optimize along the entire chain. This creates efficiency in the business and improves brand consistency, resulting in higher loyalty and product engagement. Many subscription-based businesses do this well.

When cross-functional teams are aligned through a common understanding of their objectives, they work together more efficiently, eliminating potential conflicts and ensuring everyone pulls in the same direction. This will lead to a more cohesive customer journey — and a better customer experience. It also leads to increased accountability.

The strength of your automation tools and data quality impacts the organization’s ability to define and report on shared goals. Reliable attribution is always helpful, but complete attribution is not essential. The whole point is that everyone has a role in reaching the same goals. 

Conflicting priorities and budget competition are big barriers to shared goals. Despite having too many priorities and limited budgets, department leaders still control how processes are managed and rewards are structured. By fine-tuning these, you can better meet customer needs.

Dig deeper: 5 signs of a customer-centric marketing team

Why build upsell and cross-sell journey maps

Customers are often aware of the handoffs within a brand, like the shift from sales to account management, and expect some bumps along the way. Consistent, life-stage-aligned content can help smooth these transitions.  

To maintain a strong connection, your content plans should cover customer engagement, upselling and loyalty strategies. Like in the awareness and evaluation stages, content from one phase can be reused — especially if you tailor it to specific industries.

Many B2B buyers do research online before speaking, even with a trusted account manager. Websites should have customer engagement content on product pages and in the blog and email messaging can be used to nurture engagement and interest. 

Short-term and targeted email series (3-8 messages) are very powerful for customers, as they can nurture upselling or higher engagement after a customer service interaction or a content download event.

The same marketing techniques used for prospecting can be used for upselling and cross-selling: 

• Segmentation.
• Personalized communication.
• Lead scoring.
• A/B testing. 

Many B2C and subscription companies already do this well. Think Amazon, Sephora and Netflix. Technology companies such as Adobe and Salesforce, with their robust product lines, use customer data to upsell existing customers. 

Automating upselling and cross-selling efforts at scale can introduce new challenges. The biggest is the risk of overwhelming customers or sending irrelevant recommendations. Plus, data has to be in good shape, and your personalization engines must be robust and well-integrated. 

I know several companies that resist automation not because of technology gaps but because they want to cross-sell with a human touch. Perhaps combining automation with personal outreach is the right mix for your brand and organizational structure. 

How customer-centric is your organization today?

Efficient operation comes down to people, processes and technology. I am often in meetings where we all lament the lack of audience-first decision-making and the scarcity of customer research. Yet, we continue to operate in silos. 

Let’s seek out the opportunities in our existing martech stack and proactively get the leadership and cross-functional support to tap them. How are you using your marketing tech prowess to serve customers throughout the journey? 

Dig deeper: Breaking down data silos: A practical guide to integrated marketing data