For most small businesses they are proudly customer centric from a values and strategy point of view. But as a small business grows, it also needs to be customer centric from a capabilities point of view. If you don’t have the tools and systems to really know who your customers are, you’re not going to be customer centric, no matter how much you want to be.
Here, we look at why small businesses must be intentional about optimising and automating business processes to connect with their customers, and how our Small Business Marketing Toolkit will help you achieve that.
How do you know your customers better?
Let’s look at marketing content – perhaps a blog or a video series – as an example of how to really get to know your most valuable customers.
You’ve created some great content, but what is its purpose? How do you know whether it is doing its desired job? You might get the click, but how’s the conversion? What is the ROI of those clicks? What’s the value to the audience, and how do you measure success?
It’s easy to track clicks on a website, just as it’s easy to track attendance at a conference booth. What businesses must move towards, however, is measuring in real time how potential customers travel through the funnel.
Of those clicks to the website, for example, how many become marketing-qualified leads? Of those leads, how many became sales-qualified opportunities? Of those opportunities, how many were closed? Of those closed, what was the cross-sell or upsell revenue over the following year? What is the total lifetime value of those customers, relative to the total cost to serve?
In other words, are they good business?
If yes, double down on that lead source. If no, shift the spend somewhere else.
The success of this and so many other processes is about measuring all of these variables in real time, so you can optimise spend based on revenue. With automation it means this can be done in the background, without very little extra effort from staff.
Once you have this real-time data, you’re able to make smart, customer centric, data-driven decisions. Compare this to before, when you simply thought you put the customer at the centre of everything, and you soon realise you didn’t know your customers as well as you thought.
How do you make smart, data-driven decisions?
When you capture the right data about the right customers, you’re able to make smart decisions. This is extremely important.
As you grow, if you don’t have data to make smart, data-driven decisions, you introduce a great deal of risk into your business. Technology is a key to being customer centric and making smart decisions.
The Small Business Marketing Toolkit supports business owners to be intentional about what their business strategy is, and how it will go hand-in-hand with their marketing strategy.
It discusses the value of a unified view of customer data across all business units and offers practical guidance from Trailblazers, around how to make that a reality.
Success is about embracing the fact that every industry is being disrupted by businesses that are taking a data-driven approach, that are looking to understand all of the data points around their customers and then curate personalised experiences, by utilising automation.
Moving down that automation path is no longer daunting. The tools are realistic for small businesses to deploy. This democratisation of technology is what’s driving the hyper disruption of every industry. It’s important to get on board if you want to thrive as a business in the decade ahead.
There are many examples where, for example, a sales team has deployed a tool that empowers them to focus on nurtured leads who are showing buying signals. So, rather than spending time calling blindly down a lead list, they’re focusing on the leads that are showing buying behaviour. This means they’re having the right conversation at the right time and are not slowed down, for example, by manual logging activities. These activities are automated.
They’re not spending time building quotes, because the technological tool they use automatically guides them through a quote quickly and offers e-signature functionality so they can digitally capture and process a signed order form.
These micro moments of automation through the sales cycle empower salespeople to focus on what they enjoy and what they’re good at, which is customer-facing conversations with the right people at the right time. Perhaps most importantly, it makes salespeople happier and more productive. That is a potent weapon in the battle for business success.
Supercharge your business and start making smart data-driven marketing decisions with the Small Business Marketing Toolkit.
