The Marketer Within: How Companies That Win Empower Every Employee to be a Fundamental Marketer

I’ve heard this story so many times, I don’t know why anyone finds it interesting anymore. I’m sure by now you have heard it as well. It’s the one where Jeff Bezos is talking to a bunch of his marketers and asks them;

“is that what the customers want?”

The marketers reply “Yes.”

To which Jeff Bezos replies, “How do you know, is the customer sitting in the chair in front of you?”

I have no way of knowing if this is how the conversation flowed, but what I do know to be true is that Amazon transformed from an online bookstore to what we know it to be today because it polled customers on what they would like to see on Amazon and made those items available. Most importantly, it also made shopping hassle-free with easy returns. Granted, Amazon today is a very different company from what it was when it became a marketplace for more than just books, the principles that brought it to success are a solid example of how the fundamental marketing principle of customer orientation gets you to the win.

Sadly, however, is that a vast majority of businesses are not implementing this simple approach, when it is clearly a key growth factor. Also, sadly, however, is that for this approach to truly work, it’s not as simple as getting in touch with customers; the reality is much more elaborate. This article will explain how to understand your customers using resources you already have internally and why customer focus is crucial for more than just the growth of the organization.

The reality is that customers, by far, are not always right and don’t know what’s good for the business, and worse, they have no idea what the business is capable of providing. I’ll give you an example: my dream business was a website for trading collectible cars (a topic I can talk about for way too long). While working to engage initial customers, I reached out to many classic car dealers, and quite often, they would ask if I could also sell parts for them. I had no intention of hawking classic car parts. Is there a need for it in the market? Maybe. Am I going to pivot my company into the classic car parts trade? Absolutely not. So why is this important to understand?

There is a fundamental understanding of customers that every marketer and everyone else who works with anything customer-related needs to understand.

Your offering, whatever it is, is there to solve a problem or provide a need that the customer has. That’s it and that’s all. Your product is not there to appease the customer’s every wish, but it better be the complete package that is the solution to the specific problem the customer has hired your offering for.

Let’s unpack that and start at the bottom and work up. Notice I used the term “hire”. That is because customers literally hire your offering for a specific purpose. This is detailed by the Jobs to be Done theory. It’s a simple but very effective concept that states that the customer “hires” your product or service to do a specific job, aka the problem that the customer needs to solve. This is key to understanding why your product is being bought and how to sell more of it.

Using my example from a classic car trading site, the reason I wouldn’t go into classic car parts is that it is a completely different market from classic cars. Adjacent but different. It’s not even a separate segment; it’s an entirely different market. I don’t know what the customers want in the classic parts market, I don’t know how many customers there are, where they are, or what their budget is, so I don’t bother jumping into that market. I do, however, know which customers want which classic cars, so I’m confidently marketing in that market. It’s crucial to keep the jobs to be done in mind. It is almost certain that there are different jobs to be done for different customer personas. It’s very easy to get off track chasing various customers’ wishes. Staying focused on your offering and its application to your customers is key. Let’s keep that in mind as we go through this article.

But customer personas and jobs to be done are things that a marketer does. Now that you have some understanding of customer mentality, let’s dive into how this works with literally everyone who works at a company. The first fact that you need to keep in mind is that customer-oriented companies win over any other companies that are not. There is no arguing this; it’s simply the way it is. The more information you have about your customer, the quicker and in a more complete fashion you can provide a service to them that they will gladly pay for. Notice that I said information and not data. Data is important, but it does not provide clues and insights unless you know what to look for. Information is what you’re looking for in the data.

Information and data are different things.  Data alone cannot provide insight; you need
                                                 a qualitative approach to correlate the data.

The second fact you need to keep in mind is that the internal information you have about your customers is far more useful than anything else. You just need to collect and organize it.

Let’s start with purchase information. At the very least, there is some data on customer demographics. You know how many products and how often they purchase from your order tracking. This is vital information if you can organize it by purchase frequency and/or quantity. If you make use of NPS (and you should), you can immediately see who is happy and who isn’t. The trick is also knowing why for both. (I will cover this more in an upcoming NPS post.)

Another super useful resource is customer interaction data from customer service. Aside from being a useful touchpoint for NPS, this data can reveal a plethora of information. Obviously, you can correlate the types of issues that customers are experiencing, but if this is all you're doing, you're leaving food on the table for your competitors. Customer support reach-outs are an opportunity to interact with a customer in an outbound way. It’s your opportunity to have a dialogue that can help you and the customer.

Most companies view customer support as an expense. It certainly can be, but if done right, it can pay high dividends in terms of revenue and branding. To put this bluntly, a company can have a terrible product (it still has to work) and amazing customer service, and it can win just with customer service. Assuming the product actually does what it was purchased for, that is.

If a customer feels heard, understood, and their issues are addressed with good communication, that customer will stick with that company. Simply because they can depend on that company. This is so much the case that top-tier customer service is touted by companies as part of their branding. This is because it assures new customers that everything will go “OK” with their purchase.

Aside from a beneficial branding statement, much can be gleaned from analyzing support call data. Actual product defects notwithstanding, support calls can show customer familiarity with the product, their satisfaction levels, friction points, and many other things, depending on how your system is set up to track support tickets. All of this information can be used to assemble a concrete set of answers about the purpose of the product for the customers and where they are finding success, where they are failing, and what they wish were different.

This can also be used to troubleshoot customer journey and friction point issues.

Most importantly, if used alongside NPS, it becomes easy to ascertain customers who are fans from those who are detractors. And this is important. If you can understand what causes someone to become a detractor, you have unlocked the information you need to win. I will include more on this in my NPS post, but a lot of answers on how your customers perceive your product are in the customer support calls. If you pay attention to what your existing customers are saying, it becomes super easy to understand which levers to pull to attract new ones.

Another critical point of information gathering is sales. Like customer service, sales interacts closely with customers, except for sales they are not customers; they are prospects. Prospects, unlike customers, carry a lot of information about what it takes to make a purchasing decision. This type of information can be useful when creating sniper-like targeting and positions that helps your offering resonate with prospects.

This is why syncing with sales is critically important. And there is a 2-way street that benefits sales directly. For starters, sales can verify if your customer personas are accurate and match actual customer attributes. However, the mutually beneficial aspect is that sales can tell you the challenges they face with customer decision-making. This critical insight can help eliminate major friction points in the customer journey. In turn, marketing can provide sales with insights or even the entire customer journey. This will help sales align with the customer’s decision-making process and help eliminate customer indecision and decrease friction. Win win!

There is another bit of gold buried within customer indecision. That is simply which features are more valuable than others and why. More on that to come in a future series that deals with meshing sales and marketing.

Now this is the part that brings this all together. There are organizational roles that interact with the customer, and then there are roles that do not. Most of the time, the focus goes towards the top, the C-suite. But oftentimes, folks in departments such as accounting and shipping might just have insights into parts of customers’ journeys that can be easily overlooked.

Things like quality control are a touchpoint, but do you know if it’s a friction point? Also, do you know what needs to be done to smooth the friction point? I’m certian that a warehouse manager does. Just like someone in accounting understands customer payments and can solve potential issues in a way that customers will appreciate.

The point here is that corporations live or die by profit. The C-suite ultimately are stuarts of corporate profitability. As such, their focus is to earn. The important thing to realize here is that the road to earning is through the customer. And because the road to earning is through the customer, every and all decisions have to incorporate how it will effect the customer.

This article outlines some internal ways, but this should also be done externally, and this is something that marketing does best, and hence everyone in the company should have the most fundamental marketing approach in mind with everything they do — how is this going to benefit existing customers, and how will this attract new customers?

How do you get a company to function like this — it starts with the C-suits. Think of it like this. Wouldn’t it be nice to discuss customers in the next all-hands instead of profits? When bosses talk about growth, revenue, and money in general, the demotivation factor for employees is huge. It just sounds selfish. But talking about your best and worst customers and how customers affect your growth, that’s a topic most, if not all, employees can get behind.