What Does it Mean to Engage with Customers?
After realizing sustained improvements in operations, company CFOs especially have asked us, “OK, now what? Now that I can produce more, how does that help me make more money?” Operational capacity only creates value when the company can turn it into qualified demand. Ultimately, companies must increase their sales, so you have to communicate, engage with customers and prospects more effectively than ever before.
What does it mean to engage with customers? It means earning attention, permission, and useful response before asking for a sale. It also means making your message clear enough that prospects can connect their own problems to your solution.
What Does It Mean To Engage With Customers?
To engage with customers is to create a conversation that helps people understand their own needs, see the value of your offer, and decide whether a deeper sales conversation makes sense. Engagement is not the same as broadcasting a pitch. It is a process of earning attention and building enough trust for the next step.
For business-to-business marketing, this usually means telling your customer’s story, not just your company’s story. The most effective messages are about satisfying customers, solving their operational problems, and helping them move toward a result they already care about.
Engage with Customers and Benefits Will Follow
When we say “telling your story,” we really mean telling your customer’s story. Your product, service, or process may be important, but the prospect is asking a simpler question: what changes for me if I pay attention?
That is why customer engagement depends on clarity. A prospect may not agree with you at first, but if the story is concrete enough, the prospect can decide to give you another increment of attention. That increment is where understanding and buy-in begin.
Visuals Connect Fast with Readers
Pictures convey more information faster than words can. A well-designed and engaging picture will convey your point in seconds. Check out this case study on our site to see how an abstract process diagram can become a story in picture form.
Visuals Improve Understanding
Because pictures convey meaning quickly, they increase your chances of getting your point across. Your viewer may not agree with you, but if you can make your case in a few seconds, your viewer can decide whether the message deserves more time.
Customer experience research has also pushed companies away from isolated touchpoints and toward the entire journey. Harvard Business Review’s analysis of customer experience makes the same point: a company has to understand how interactions fit together, not just optimize one contact at a time.
Visuals Help Get Buy-in from Viewers
Pictures engage viewers by helping them create their own mental version of your story. Visuals work like a framework, begging to be filled in and embellished. A viewer cannot help but fill in the gaps.
Stories can create more involvement than strictly factual presentations because they ask the viewer to follow a situation, infer what matters, and imagine the result. By presenting stories, with visuals being a near-instant way of conveying stories, you excite involvement and enhance the customer experience. Through involvement, your prospects have bought in to your point of view, at least somewhat. That change in perspective is the point of communication.
Using the Web to Engage With Customers
With your story told, you will want to get your message out where potential customers can find it. Nothing is more efficient for that than digital marketing. The work goes beyond simply having a website and hoping that potential customers will find your website.
Permission Marketing Process
Like dating, the marketing process is one of gaining increasing degrees of permission from your prospects. Marketing must garner plenty of permission before it makes sense to send in Sales to ask for a commitment. Asking for the sale before you and your prospect have gotten acquainted is like a bad date in high school.
Never send in Sales to do Marketing’s job. Your marketing messages and online tools can engage prospects who are in the early phases of getting to know you. Sending in Sales too early, before Marketing has established a rapport, is overbearing and a waste of time for Sales.
Marketing is Cost Effective
Marketing is much more cost-effective per contact than a sales person could ever be. For instance, if there are 10,000 potential customers in your industry, do you really want your salesman keeping in touch with all of them, or would you rather have that person spend time closing sales with prospects who are ready to buy something?
Using the Internet and other means of engagement, Marketing can identify real prospects and hand those over to Sales. Then Sales can spend its time closing opportunities rather than prospecting aimlessly.
Marketing Generates Leads for Sales
After Marketing has done its job generating leads, finding the few prospects ready to discuss something specific, it is time for Sales to step in. That handoff works best when the marketing message, the customer story, and the sales conversation all describe the same problem and result.
By “channel sales” we mean that if you sell something that enables larger companies to get more business from their existing customers, you may do better to sell through them than selling directly to end customers. But you have to make it super-easy for your channel-sales partners to sell your products and services, which gets back to having an effective story. Selling your product has to be easier for your partners than rolling out of bed and hitting the floor.
If you have good reason to sell direct, perhaps you need just two or three big deals this year, then tightly coupling your marketing message to a solution-selling program may be the most efficient approach.
More Capacity = More Opportunity For Improvement
As bottlenecks move from Operations to Sales, so too must your focus for improvement. Customers have told us that they want help in Sales just as much as they do in Operations. After you have released capacity from operations, the next question is whether your market-facing process can absorb that capacity and turn it into revenue.
Customer Focus
Customer focus that is solely on your customer may lead to a reactive focus. You may respond quickly when the customer asks for something, but you still wait for the request before you learn what is changing.
Proactive vs. Reactive Customer Focus
Your customer’s customer provides you with information that can increase your reaction time and move you toward a more proactive focus. Think about your customer’s changing needs. Why are they changing? If only you knew what your customer knew, then you could plan for the change before your customer even tells you about it.
For example, when you shop at the supermarket, the checkout person scans your items into the register for your total, but the register also transmits point-of-sale data to various vendors for automatic replenishment. This is one form of vendor-managed inventory that allows companies like Procter & Gamble to sync production with the end user, which is your customer’s customer.
Engaging with Customers
This technique works for any company in the entire supply chain. You can improve the effectiveness of your whole supply chain by linking the companies together to share information and improve customer satisfaction. How familiar are you with your customer’s customer?
We have shown you how to engage with customers through the marketing process to generate lead prospects more effectively than before. Start with the customer’s story, use visuals to make the story clear, let Marketing earn permission, and bring in Sales when the prospect is ready for a specific conversation.
Frequently Asked Questions
What Does It Mean To Engage With Customers?
Engaging with customers means earning attention, trust, and useful response before asking for a sale. It includes telling the customer’s story, making your value easy to understand, and using marketing signals to know when Sales should step in.
Why Should Marketing Tell The Customer’s Story?
Marketing works better when the message is about the customer’s problem, goal, and result. A company-centered message can explain features, but a customer-centered story helps prospects see themselves in the outcome.
How Do Visuals Help Customer Engagement?
Visuals help customers understand a message quickly and build their own mental version of the story. Pictures, diagrams, and dashboards can make an abstract benefit easier to evaluate.
When Should Sales Get Involved With A Prospect?
Sales should get involved after Marketing has created enough permission and interest for a specific conversation. Moving too early can feel overbearing and wastes selling time on people who are not ready to buy.
What Is Proactive Customer Focus?
Proactive customer focus means watching the customer’s customer and the signals that show where demand is moving. Point-of-sale data, feedback, and vendor-managed inventory can help a company react before the customer has to ask.
