I am on a ‘customer experience kick’ this week…because everywhere I turn, I seem to be running into people and organizations that are more internally focused, And by ‘focused internally’, I mean they are focused on their product more than my need or want.
So I suggest taking a step back and looking at things from the customer’s perspective.
They don’t care about your product. They care about their own wants and needs. They want to know “What’s in it for me?”
Most marketers think there’s a concept called a product life cycle. Once you realize that the world is organized by jobs that need to be done, you understand that product life cycles don’t exist.
If you understand cause and effect, it brings about a set of insights that leads you to a very different place. The knowledge will persuade you that the market isn’t organized by customer category or by product category. If you understand the job that consumers need to complete, you can articulate all of the experiences in that job. (Source: One Simple Question to Unlock Unbeatable Marketing: Clayton Christensen Interview)
When you are putting together your sales and marketing plan, step back from traditional thinking and ask “What is the buyer attempting to achieve?” The answers will have a significant impact on attracting, converting, retaining profitable customers.
A company’s product and the buying process must provide a sense of job completion for the customer. If a company can accomplish this, it can gain an advantage in the marketplace.
“When a company identifies how to integrate the processes needed to give the consumer a sense of job completion, it can blow away the competition. A product is easy to copy but experiences are very hard to replicate,” Christensen says. (Source: One Simple Question to Unlock Unbeatable Marketing: Clayton Christensen Interview)
Remember Saturn in the early days? They designed the experience around the customer by focusing on being open, honest, transparent and fun. When my parent’s bought one, they were presented their car in a special room and were surrounded by employees singing a song of thanks!
Anyway – think about what the customer wants and needs (it’s a nail in the wall, not your hammer) and how to make the experience so uniquely valuable (and consistent). Do that and you can downplay that investment into marketing automation or social media because the word-of-mouth will be amazing.
What do you think? Do you prefer that drip email campaign that you’re on the receiving end of – or do you prefer dealing with someone that knows what you need and makes the process special?
