by Mike Connor, Principal
Spice Catalyst
Revenue, business outcomes and marketing ROI are at stake
2013 is the year in which leaders pull together marketing methodology, automation and analytics. It’s also the year in which the customer journey will emerge as the centerpiece in leadership marketing strategies.
Why is the customer journey taking center stage? Because it’s the overall experience high-value prospects and customers have across the customer journey that most influence the answer to the CEO’s biggest marketing question. “What kind of return will we get on our investment in marketing and sales?”
Creating an Insanely Great Customer Journey takes a top-level commitment and requires ongoing investment and management. But the return on that investment is huge. Well designed and managed it will dramatically increase the return on your product, marketing and sales spending. It accelerates the value delivered to and created by your highest value prospects and customers. It creates deep management insight into each stage. It delivers a seamless, engaging and personalized experience to prospects, champions and influencers. Each touch point and stage captures and delivers insight to key decision makers in your company. It is a journey that is continually updated and innovated to help your company stay ahead of the competitive learning and innovation curve.
Easy to say. Hard to do. Is there a realistic way to get there? We think there is and it involves what we call an Agile Business Acceleration methodology. The key is:
- working in rapid time-bound sprints to assess and undertake the needed changes
- establishing a clear picture of your highest value prospects and customers and what will create real differentiating value for them in each stage of the customer journey
- evaluating your company’s vision, strategy, processes, organizations and systems and customer journey components and prioritizing initiatives to align them to better support your vision.
- working on those priorities in small incremental time-bound stages called sprints. Each sprint involves defining the value you intend to deliver to the customer and to your organization and the deliverables required to achieve that and then validating that those actually deliver value. As the feedback comes in, you course correct your overall vision and your priorities for the next sprints.
Using that methodology you are building against a clear vision; delivering, validating and refining that vision in rapid measurable steps that build on the success; and learning from the previous stages. The result. Each sprint increases learning, success and momentum and reduces potential risk and waste in the next sprint.
What do you get for all that hard work?
An Insanely Great Customer Journey to start. But you will actually have achieved far more than that. By rallying the customer facing organizations around the Customer Journey and by incorporating not just marketing deliverables but the vision, strategy, processes, systems in that transformation process you will have also built an Insanely Great Company. A company that has capability to learn, innovate and deliver results faster and more effectively than competitors who haven’t gone through this process.
About the Author:
Mike Connor, Principal with Spice Catalyst, is the author of Creating an Insanely Great Customer Journey. Learn more by checking out the Video Overview and cool Flipbook Sampler of the Creating an Insanely Great 2013 Customer Journey Business Acceleration Guide.