Mitja-Alexander Linss is the founder and senior advisor of Global Marketing Ventures and the head of marketing at Karger Publishers. Mitja discusses how demand creation, lead generation, lead acquisition, and growth are not the main goals of customer centricity. The secret is in your company's ability to grow consistently.
Read this blog post until the conclusion and take Mitja's helpful advice about paying attention to and treating customers respectfully. He will answer some questions and also debunk two myths related to RevOps.
Myth 1: Silos might not be effectively broken down by renaming departments and workflows alone.
RevOps, according to him, is the process of combining customer support, marketing, and sales to provide a smooth customer experience. He highlights that providing departmental names alone cannot eliminate silos.
Real progress requires actively breaking down obstacles, coordinating teams from different departments, and reorganizing processes along the customer journey.
He emphasizes the value of collaborating across functional boundaries while maintaining the highest level of transparency and low ego. Then only can teams collaborate for real.
Myth 2: Customer-centricity may have additional drivers besides RevOps, even though it is a major one.
Mitja clarifies the myth that RevOps solely drives customer-centricity. He believes that a fundamental shift in approach that puts the consumer's needs first is necessary for true transformation. This involves considering client-centricity as the primary guiding concept, keeping a close eye on the value of the customer, and going above and beyond to satisfy needs. He believes that while RevOps can help this change by encouraging team integration and alignment, a company-wide dedication to the customer is the true driver.
He states that HubSpot's success results from a strong customer focus that impacts every area and is not limited to a surface-level benefit. Customer-centricity is the main idea in RevOps, even though optimization is also important.
How would his organization implement a customer-centric approach similar to HubSpot, particularly about touchpoints?
Medical publisher Carter understood the importance of true customer centricity. He created an understandable, customer-focused narrative and gave them the tools to use facts and reviews to build their own stories.
He produced data-driven decisions that put the customers' requirements first by combining various pieces of information into a single source of information.
Carter was taken on a long journey by this multi-pronged strategy based on storytelling, consumer voice, and analytics, demonstrating the value of genuinely listening to and responding to customers.
How does he deal with the technological obstacles that keep him up at night while implementing customer-centric methods in CRM and marketing workflows?
Fragmentation of data keeps him awake at night. He struggles with an abundance of separate applications that serve a variety of consumers, including authors, institutions, librarians, and industry clients, even though Salesforce CRM forms the foundation.
Basic data access is further complicated by various production systems, such as Manuscript Manager, which differs from the simplified data approaches of Enterprise or SAS startups.
His inability to integrate the various information makes it difficult to comprehend customer demands and identify key touchpoints. He uses data warehousing, but it is not as user-friendly as one might think and is a constant struggle.
He uses Google Data Studio to incorporate Google Analytics traffic for well-informed decision-making and Pardo within Salesforce CRM to improve processes.
Making data easily accessible for analysis is still the key obstacle. He observes that other marketers using systems like HubSpot also have to overcome the challenge of data unification.
How can the fragmented information that keeps him up at night be centrally located?
He oversaw the creation of a data warehouse that combined information from several systems into a single location that Salesforce could access, leading an IT team effort.
This first phase focuses on important author data with almost half a million author and reviewer sets. He hopes to spot patterns and draw conclusions about the behavior of authors, especially how they submit research papers, which are a major source of income, by gradually adding more information.
Mitja highlights how crucial it is to quickly access data in Salesforce so that decisions based on author actions can be made with clarity. He recognizes that data integration is a real problem that calls for cooperation with the IT department and some programming, even if it sounds simple.
Ultimately, he sees this program as a pillar of Carter's customer-centric approach since greater information leads to wiser choices and better customer support.
Does he believe the fundamentals of client-centricity will stay the same, or does he see any changes in how businesses approach it in the future?
Mitja thinks that focusing on the consumer's needs will be crucial for success in the future. He believes that emerging technologies like AI can be quite useful in achieving customer-centricity in CRM and marketing automation. Technology created opportunities for a stronger customer focus while recognizing his difficulties with data fragmentation five or ten years ago.
He observes a shift in organizational focus towards customer needs alignment driven by technological advancements and market dynamics. This change involves a turn towards community development and serving knowledgeable B2B audiences to generate demand. He truly believes that successful firms in the future will be driven by a customer-centric approach, driven by market forces and technology.
Why are people choosing a practical, customer-centric approach over a theoretical one?
It is not enough just to say that you prioritize your customers; you have to act on it. Teams have been established at Carter to focus on the customer experience by bringing together various departments inside the organization.
By employing this strategy, they are removing departmental barriers and ensuring that everyone collaborates to satisfy customers. Everyone works as a team to keep customers at the center of every operation, emphasizing that it is about more than technology.
How did he get into this journey of customer service and RevOps?
He gained knowledge from his experiences working for several companies that did not put the customers' needs first.
After more than ten years as a marketing leader, he concluded that maintaining current customer relationships is as important for long-term organizational success as top-of-funnel initiatives like lead generation.
He highlights giving customers equal attention, as satisfaction encourages favorable recommendations. This is ignored by many businesses in the mistaken belief that it will self-manage.
He promotes a sustainable growth approach that places customers first, emphasizing the significance of the message and product-market fit. He admits the ongoing significance of funnel optimization and planning despite this emphasis.
Listen to the full episode here.
