At Lattice Engines we are always listening to and learning from our customers. Each of our customers have their own exciting business needs and goals- they all have sales motions, cultures, incentives, workflows, etc., unique to their organization. As you can imagine, we must constantly monitor many avenues to ensure we stay up-to-date on our customers and prospects.
That means we are always receiving insight on how sales reps work and how we can help them reach peak performance.
We have a team of Customer Advocates dedicated to ensuring our end users are getting the most out of salesPRISM. This means providing basics services such as training and learning materials to our users, but the most important part of the job is really listening and learning from them. Our Customer Advocates spend a lot of time with our end users, paying attention to how they do their jobs and what matters to them so we can provide the highest quality product and service. The constant interaction between us and our customers is called "Customer Engagement."
A few months ago, B2B sales thought-leader, Paul Greenberg wrote a two-part series about the era of Customer Engagement. He defined Customer Engagement as having the following criteria:
- The customer has ongoing involvement with the company for their own specific reasons. (The company doesn't have to know all of them. But they have to have enough knowledge of the individual customer to support the determination of what it will take to maintain or expand the customer's relationship with them.)
- The customer has control over the engagement with the company at any level.
- The company provides the customer with the products, services, tools and experiences that the customer needs to make an intelligent decision on how they want to be (selectively) engaged with the company.
- The engagement provides a measurable result that reflects an impact on the company and displays the value of the engagement to the company and the customer.
In addition to enhancing your own products and services, listening to customers and prospects has additional benefits. In part two, we will discuss how customer engagement can lead to more sales, and how you can implement customer listening into your sales process by taking advantage of big data.
Is your business actively participating in the era of Customer Engagement? Please share your thoughts and insights below.