Customer Experience

  • Marketing and Sales Alignment is Step One

    Posted April 19, 2010 By in Customer Experience, Retention and Loyalty With | 2 Comments

    There has been a lot of great conversations in just the past week about the importance of aligning marketing and sales – but the majority of those conversations have focused on attracting, engaging and converting new customers.

    What about the importance of the customer experience after the purchase so that the experience drives repeat purchases, loyalty and even referrals?

    And, once you start down this path, you have to answer a key question about the alignment of marketing and sales with service, administration, distribution…

    Now, if your business limits the role of marketing to promotion and lead generation,  you should be asking how your business aligns with the needs, wants and expectations of your target audience in order to ensure they consistently enjoy a unique, valuable experience that attracts, engages, converts and retains profitable customers?

    If service and administration and shipping fails to continue delivering the same high quality experience that the customer enjoyed from marketing and sales, your business will see negative word-of-mouth from a great many ‘one and done’ customers.

    And eventually, marketing and sales alignment won’t be able to overcome negative word-of-mouth so new customer acquisition will slow to a trickle…

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    patmcgraw
    Pat McGraw founded [mcgraw | marketing] in 1999 in order to provide growth-oriented small businesses with hands-on services that increase sales and marketing performance. In addition to offering coaching, consulting and interim executive solutions to businesses, Pat has taught business and marketing courses at several colleges and universities and is a frequent speaker at conferences around the country.

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Hi Jamie,

Interesting concept - would love to dive into it a little deeper - my initial concern is that too many departments/silos can create too many problems but I completely agree with you that there should be more of a focus on retention because that's where the real money (profit) is!

What are your thoughts on 'retention' departments? I've always thought that retention departments can be more important than the original 'sales' departments if built and managed correctly.

© Pat McGraw 2008-12

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