As 2023 comes to a close, we wanted to recap some of the best insights shared by guests on this year’s All About the Customer podcast. Over 18 episodes, we covered a wide range of customer-centric topics with leading experts across sales, marketing, customer experience, and more.
In this article, I’ll touch on some of my biggest learnings from these incredible guests and provide actionable advice that will help you put customers first in 2024 and beyond.
Solve for Confidence
We started the year with bestselling author Brent Adamson, who emphasized that boosting customer confidence should be your single biggest focus area. As he explains:
“If there’s one thing that we could and should be solving for right now as a commercial organization, whether it’s sales or marketing, it is we need to be solving for customer confidence. […] The single biggest attribute that drives up the likelihood of customers buying a bigger deal with a broader scope at the higher price point and feeling better about it is customer confidence.”
Brent stresses that confidence relates to the buying process itself—are customers asking the right questions, drawing the right conclusions, and pursuing the right solution? Building confidence requires understanding their perspective to provide personalized guidance and recommendations.
Lead with Empathy
Seasoned customer marketer Natalie Gullatt highlighted the immense value of empathy when engaging customers. She explains how stressing events in a customer’s personal life can change their needs in that moment:
“If you have a customer who is going through a rebrand… that is a stressful time. So if you are in the customer’s position and you still need the things that you need right now, they may not want to do a case study. They may be more inclined to do an online review that takes ten minutes.”
Truly putting yourself in the customer’s shoes allows you to understand their unique situation and meet them where they are. While you may have an ask ready, empathy means patiently listening first.
Strategize Gifting Thoughtfully
Cassie Sneed, the Senior Manager of Global Customer Marketing at Reputation, covered the art of customer gift-giving. She suggests taking a strategic approach that aligns with the customer journey:
“Look at that customer from start to finish. So if you’re thinking about welcome gifts when they first join on with you, to those renewal gifts, to advocacy gifts, just make sure you’re having that timed out appropriately. You’re trying to time out if someone’s welcome is right when your end-of-the-year gifts might be, trying to figure out the timing and the overlap so it’s not too much in your face.”
Coordinate gifting campaigns to provide value during key moments, while avoiding fatigue from too much outreach.
Foster Community
Michelle Randall, the CMO at Playvox emphasized community as a key lever for driving customer advocacy. She reflects on her early days using Eloqua:
“What Eloqua did back then is they formed a community. And so I continued to buy their software, not because they had differentiated features, but more because the community that I got of other marketers who were struggling with similar things that I was back in the day, that was really the reason.”
Building connections between users fosters loyalty beyond just meeting functional needs. Facilitating peer sharing spotlights your value in enabling their success.
Get Back to Basics
Forbes best-selling author Jeff Pedowitz called out companies for losing sight of customer needs:
“Everyone talks about, oh yeah, we’re building a better customer experience. We’re all about customer-centricity and transformation. No, they’re not.You can respond quickly to your customers, have a high customer satisfaction rating, successfully close their case to their ticket, and be nice. That’s about responding. That’s being of service, which is important. But customer centricity is designing your systems, your people, your processes, your tech—everything is centred around the customer.”
While good service matters, true transformation requires understanding and optimizing for customer jobs to be done across the entire company. Don’t lose sight of this north star as you scale.
Prove Your Value
Allyson Havener, SVP of Marketing and Community at TrustRadius, discussed economic uncertainty leading customers to reevaluate budgets and their tech stack. As she warns, “Just because you have your […] customer base doesn’t mean that they’re loyal.”
In this environment, retention requires continually proving your value. Leverage customer feedback to showcase impact and refine positioning around the outcomes they seek.
Listen More, Then Talk
Lauren Turner, the Director of Customer Marketing at Alyce, covered an underrated skill for customer centricity: listening. Developing her improv comedy skills enhanced her ability to deeply understand customers:
“It’s easier said than done, but before you think about your personal goals or the things that you’re trying to do, really think about the things that the customer wants. Because if you’re just going at those conversations when you’re in sales mode of, hey, let me tell you about our new feature they might be telling you about their mom is going through chemo.”
Like comedy, conversations require reading the room and responding appropriately. Improving listening leads to richer dialogues.
Involve the Entire Company
Advisor Julie Norquist Roy focuses on driving customer advocacy across organizations:
“It is everyone’s job. There is not one team, certainly not just CX, that can make that happen. It takes intention. But I think everyone again feels a lot better about what they’re here for because if we’re not driving revenue and a big part of that is retention and growth in our customer base, they probably can’t attribute their work to any critical business goal.”
Customers want to feel the entire company cares about their success. Ensure all roles understand their impact on retention and satisfaction.
Invest in Education
Mark Kilens, the CEO and co-founder of TACK, detailed his educational approach throughout his career spanning HubSpot and Drift:
“We focused on then saying, ‘We have all this great content. How do we turn this into programmatic education?’ Courses, classes, certifications, and online cohort-based live training. If we can get some customers, or a lot of our customers before they become a customer, to engage with that stuff, their motivation level and their interest level goes up and they intrinsically become more willing to talk to sales.”
Education establishes your credibility while priming interest. Shortened sales cycles then focus on tailored adoption instead of a broader explanation.
Don’t Create in a Silo
Sara Varni, CMO at Attentive, covered a common marketing pitfall—building campaigns and content in an isolated bubble:
“What happens is that marketing goes into the bunker, builds this message that they think is the greatest thing since sliced bread and they’re all excited about it. And then when it gets out in the real world, it just doesn’t land. It feels like it’s disconnected from the real world and what the buyer of the product actually deals with on a day-to-day basis.”
Getting customer input, even in the early stages, enhances resonance and relevance. Marketing is a team sport—leverage perspectives from the field.
Think Outside-In
Johann Wrede, CXO at Emburse, detailed an outside-in approach focused purely on the customer:
“It’s literally putting yourself in the shoes of the customer, walking their path, trying to think about what are the questions that a customer would ask. How would a customer describe this? What words do they use? We often want to jump into an explanation about who we are and what we do, and we have these great words that are jargonistic—words we’ve made up to describe features and functions of the products we’re selling.”
Your vocabulary and framing likely differ from what your customers are saying and thinking. Inhabiting their world allows you to communicate and position your value more effectively.
Embed Customer Centricity in Culture
Teresa Anania, the SVP of Global Customer Experience at Zendesk, believes customer retention requires company-wide ownership:
“There is not one team, certainly not just CX, that can make that happen. So whether it’s by having executive sponsors be assigned to top accounts across the company, not only does the customer feel like, ‘Wow this company really cares about me,’ but our leaders learn more about what our customers are going through and it’s a great opportunity.”
Fostering connections between customers and internal leaders spotlights real-world needs. This builds urgency and empathy for enhancing their experience.
Continually Evolve Your Understanding
Vikram Dutt, the Vice President of Industry, Product and Portfolio Marketing at Autodesk covered their transition from product-centric to customer-centric. When asked for lessons learned, he emphasized:
“The first thing we need to do is continue to improve our understanding of our audiences, really getting more and more detailed and knowledgeable about their pain points, what’s happening in their work environment. So really helping them with that transition is something we can invest within and really help our customers in that journey.”
No matter how far you are in this transition, building audience intelligence must remain an ongoing priority to shape strategy.
Engage Advocates Early and Often
Finally, Dr. Genefa Murphy, the CMO at Udemy, challenges us to involve customers as advocates early in their journey:
“Why do we all stress so much about creating customer advocates and having that case study and that ROI? Well, it’s because we want to use those advocates to advocate for us, to prospects so that we can sell more, right?”
Starting simple, ask new users why they chose you and what they hope to achieve. This establishes the value narrative and gets their early input to influence future buyers.
Key Takeaways
If one common theme ties these incredible guests together, it’s keeping the customer front and center in everything you do. While discussed a lot, executing this in practice across the entire customer lifecycle requires intentionality.
Keeping the customer at the heart of your work requires a dedication to continuous improvement and evolution. But these insights from world-class leaders provide a roadmap to drive meaningful change in the new year.
