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mx

G00276429

Build a Better B2B Customer Experience

Program
Published: 26 March 2015

Analyst(s): Tad Travis

B2B customer experience programs need full participation from salespeople

and leaders to be successful. IT leaders supporting sales should ensure that
sales has a full voice in the program, following Gartner's best practices for
B2B customer journey design, process ownership and tool selection.

Key Challenges
■ B2B sales processes are central to corporations' customer experience programs, because face-
to-face interactions have more impact on customers than voice or digital. However, the degree
to which sales organizations actively participate in customer experience design often doesn't
extend beyond sales pipeline design.
■ Because so many customer interactions occur outside of digital channels, B2B sales
organizations do not make as robust a contribution to customer experience programs as do
their support or marketing peers.
■ B2B organizations with strong contributions from sales into customer experience programs
have implemented a mix of presales and postsales processes, commonly only needing to
repurpose sales enablement solutions that were already deployed within the organization.

Recommendations
IT leaders supporting sales should:

■ Ensure that the customer journey mapping focuses on your customers' view of your sales
processes.
■ Extend sales' roles to all relevant customer journey touchpoints, including postpurchase
interactions.
■ Audit, collate, communicate and automate the sales processes that improve the customer
experience.

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Introduction
Gartner defines customer experience as being the cumulative effect of your customer's perceptions
and related feelings caused by the one-off and cumulative effect of interactions with a supplier's
employees, systems, channels or products. B2B sales teams have a significant role in the process,
given their participation in all stages of the customer's life cycle. Increasingly, Gartner finds
companies that are moving beyond traditional CRM efforts and into customer experience initiatives,
where interactions and perceptions across all departments are formally tracked, audited and
managed. They undertake these efforts to demonstrate their responsiveness to customers, to
improve their customer satisfaction (CSAT) scores and to help increase the likeliness that
salespeople become trusted advisors to their clients.

Gartner has collected best practices from several companies that have put sales teams at the heart
of their customer experience programs. The first practice involves building customer journey maps
that describe how your customers experience your products and services, rather than modeling
their journeys as a simple sales pipeline or linear sales process. The second practice is the process
of uncovering all the interaction points that sales has with clients, including those that occur
postsales. In the third practice, companies deploy tools and processes to salespeople that support
the objectives of the customer experience program.

Analysis
Ensure That the Customer Journey Mapping Focuses on Your Customers' View of
Your Sales Processes
Customer journey mapping is an increasingly common design process, used to capture how
customers achieve their goals with your products and services. (For more information on customer
journey design, see "Use Journey Maps in User Experience Design and Digital Workplaces.")

Written from the perspective of several different customer roles (for example, end user, consumer or
economic buyer), customer journeys highlight the gaps between a customer's expectations and
perceptions versus the actual experience. The best-designed journey maps depict your customers'
life cycle from their point of view, capturing every significant interaction point, known as moments of
truth.

When B2B sales leaders get involved in customer journey mapping, however, a significant issue
commonly arises. Too often, the customers' journey mappings devolve into a linear, traditional view
of their sales funnels. Terms like suspect, prospect, needs qualification and contract negotiation
predominate in B2B mappings, as shown in Figure 1.

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Figure 1. Internal, Sales-Centric View of B2B Customers' Journey

Source: Gartner (March 2015)

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This process may accurately capture the internal processes, as well as accurately describe the
customer state and status values that you assign to a given business prospect, but it doesn't
capture how your clients and prospects describe themselves or how they feel. Their interactions
with your enterprise will never match the terminology that you use. For example, a company that is
evaluating your services will never describe itself as a "prospect account, with an early-stage needs
qualification opportunity."

Because the point of customer journey mapping is to match your clients' needs with your service
delivery systems and processes, IT leaders should encourage all those who participate in the
mapping process, particularly those from sales, to invert their perspective. Rather than using your
own terms to describe the customer journey, use terms that align with a customer's perspective, as
shown in Figure 2.

Figure 2. Model of How B2B Customers Describe Their Informational Needs

Source: Gartner (March 2015)

Applying this model to a hypothetical example, the stakeholders considering a six-figure machinery
purchase progress through several stages, moving from stage one, identifying their need, to stage
eight, optimized use of the product. The stakeholders will not purchase your product until they cross
several milestones:

■ They have validated their needs against common practices in their industry.
■ They have researched all important considerations.
■ They feel empowered enough to critically and thoroughly evaluate your offerings.

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This model serves an additional purpose. It emphasizes that the customer experience is not linear.
Customer experience doesn't start or stop as clients move from buy-side processes to own-side
processes. This is important for sales organizations to bear in mind, as a guard against the limited
type of customer experience design shown in Figure 1.

Validate Your Customer Journey Mapping Against All of Sales' Touchpoints With
Customers
As a next step toward ensuring that sales contributes fully to the customer experience program, go
beyond just conceptual descriptions. It is equally necessary that you design and implement the
concrete things that sales must do to deliver quality customer experiences.

Sales' role in customer experience is not relegated to a narrow domain — the period in between the
end of marketing qualification and the end of contract negotiation. Sales clearly does more than just
sell. Sales also makes a strong contribution to postsales efforts, as shown in these examples:

■ Escalate clients' concerns about product defects.

■ Resolve billing issues arising from a billing system error.
■ Manage peer connections and executive outreach programs.

These customer touchpoints are deliberately selected to demonstrate that salespeople have a
valuable perspective into all elements of your go-to-market and service delivery processes.
However, their input is often discounted in journey processes because the processes are outside of
the sales domain. As you design your B2B customer experience, solicit input on customer pain
points from sales, looking for nonobvious examples of customer issues, or examples of unmet
customer expectations not captured in other systems.

For a way of managing those nonobvious observations, see Figure 3, which depicts a customer
experience design model that spans five departments. The areas in green are the touchpoints that
sales directly owns. The areas in red indicate customer touchpoints, outside of sales' domain, to
which sales itself makes a formal, consistent contribution.

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Figure 3. Customer Experience Design Model

Acronym Key: CX — customer experience

Source: Gartner (March 2015)

In some cases, sales will lead the process, and, in others, sales will provide a supporting role.
Regardless of the division of labor, at many B2B companies, sales plays a crucial role in the
execution of the customer experience processes. By collecting, sharing and distributing data points
and issues collected directly from clients and prospects, sales provides a valuable form of primary
research that can only be partially replaced with voice of the customer (VoC) primary surveys and
focus groups.

Once you have taken these steps, assess the tools and processes that are necessary to support
sales' contribution to the program, as explained in the next section.

Audit, Collate, Communicate and Automate the Sales Processes That Improve the
Customer Experience
There are now many B2B companies that have adopted customer experience programs. In support
of these programs, they have implemented processes and technologies that enable salespeople to
maintain a crucial role in customer experience journeys. And customer experience leaders are
finding that they can support sales' contributions to customer experience programs with processes
and systems that are already in place or available for free.

Examples from recent interviews include:

■ A supply chain software vendor discovered, during VoC surveys, significant dissatisfaction with
the vendor's sales processes. To facilitate cultural and process changes, the vendor adopted a
strategic account planning system. With the tool, the vendor found that sales was able to track

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the details in conversations that proved that it was attuned to customers' needs and responsive
to their expectations.
■ A global software vendor built a formal postsales customer experience program. It includes
internal-facing processes, such as customer health monitoring, and external processes, such as
a customer advisory program and regular quarterly business reviews with key clients. Sales
leaders are significant stakeholders in this program, because they bring clients into the advisory
program and lead quarterly business reviews.

To achieve the results realized by these companies, begin the process by auditing and collating your
current processes, even those outside of sale's domain, following the examples provided in Table 1.

Table 1. Candidate Customer Experience Processes

Feedback Processes Product/Service Processes Educational Processes

Customer advisory boards Early-adopter programs Interactive learning clinics

Customer advocates/customer success Ideation programs for product/ Peer-to-peer online forums
managers service design

Executive sponsorship Rapid deployment assistance Peer-to-peer meetings

Quarterly business reviews Product reviews Product training

Technical support Client recognition programs User groups

Quality control escalation rights User experience analysis User adoption programs

VoC, CSAT, Net Promoter Score (NPS) ROI/business case development

surveys

Source: Gartner (March 2015)

During this exercise, look for opportunities for reusability and adaptability. Are there processes
already being used by other departments, such as customer support, that can be reapplied to
measure customer satisfaction with your services? Is the information shared and exchanged in
quarterly business reviews with clients formally part of the customer experience program? Does
marketing monitor channels for customer sentiment, and, if so, is it shared across the entire
organization so that processes can be adjusted rapidly?

After completing this audit and collation, match customer experience design, as described in the
preceding sections, with process execution. As with any other process change effort, successful
change requires effective communication. The leading companies do three key things:

■ They consistently communicate the purpose and objectives of the custom experience program
to the entire organization.
■ They consistently explain how each process contributes to the objectives of the program.

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■ They measure every department's (even sales) contribution to the objectives.

For example, the sales team at the same software company referenced above has an important role
in the customer experience program. Consistent with expectations coming from the CEO, that team
ensures that every customer interaction contributes to one of three objectives: grow CSAT scores,
increase client referenceability or build the pipeline. To keep the organization aligned, the CEO
reviews these metrics very month.

Next, look for automation candidates. In most cases, the technology is being used to support
internal employees, rather than supporting customers, but that is changing. Some of these
processes are supported by sales enablement solutions, some of which may be new to your
organization, and some of which may already be deployed in your organization.

Table 2. Sales Enablement Solutions for B2B Customer Experience Programs

Solution or Process Use Cases or Purposes Example Vendors

VoC Collect feedback from clients on sales and support Allegiance, SynGro,
execution, and CSAT SurveyMonkey, Clicktools from
CallidusCloud

Sales enablement hubs Internal portals for hosting sales content, managing Microsoft, Oracle, Salesforce,
peer references and internal collaboration Savo

Subscription and Product adoption monitoring, subscription Aria, Bluenose, Gainsight,

customer success processes and renewal risk management Totango, Zuora
management

Strategic account Account planning, sales plan execution and selling Anaplan, Axiom, Revegy, The TAS
management techniques Group

Training and certification Validate that customer-facing employees are CallidusCloud, IBM, Oracle,
qualified to deliver sales messages, and to manage Qstream, Salesforce
customer queries, objections, etc.

Quarterly business Formal, regularly occurring health checks with top Commonly satisfied with sales
reviews customers force automation (SFA)
customization

Opportunity Critical evaluation of go-to-market and sales Commonly satisfied with SFA
postmortems execution processes customization

Product/service quality Provide detailed feedback on product quality Commonly satisfied with SFA
monitoring feedback to augment details captured by support customization

Source: Gartner (March 2015)

Companies will find that they may already have deployed some of these processes or technologies.
Internal collaboration portals, quarterly business reviews and opportunity postmortems are not new;
however, it is not common to see them applied consistently, in support of a customer experience
program.

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These solutions may pertain to sales and nonsales resources alike, but that's the point of a
customer experience program. Customers only care about your internal processes to the extent that
they help all customer-facing resources deliver an experience that:

■ Remembers all of your interactions

■ Makes hand-offs across departments easy, seamless and personalized
■ Proves that their priorities are your priorities

When implemented and adopted fully, the processes and tools listed above go a long way toward
proving to B2B clients that you are dedicated to improving their experience with your company.

Gartner Recommended Reading

Some documents may not be available as part of your current Gartner subscription.

"Strategic Account Management Augments the Capabilities of SFA Systems"

"Engage Sales Channels in VoC Programs to Increase Operational Effectiveness"

"Five Best Practices to Improve Your B2B Road Map for Sales Enablement"

"Tuning In to Customers by Using 'Voice of the Customer' Solutions"

"Hype Cycle for CRM Sales, 2014"

"Market Guide for Voice-of-the-Customer Vendors"

Evidence
To complete this research, Gartner interviewed B2B companies from the software, high-tech,
education and manufacturing industries.

More on This Topic

This is part of two in-depth collections of research. See the collections:

■ Customer Experience Is the New Competitive Battlefield

■ Route to Market Essentials: Research on Routes to Market, Channels and Sales

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