Don’t Forget the Post-Sale Engagement

Post-sale customer engagement, an often-overlooked part of the customer life cycle, helps B2B companies with customer retention, loyalty, growth, and advocacy, according to a new report from Forrester Research.

In fact, a proactive post-sale customer engagement strategy is critical to ensure that companies get full value from their customer relationships, Forrester says. “A mutually valuable relationship with the customer base not only improves a company’s profitability and growth; it also protects against economic turbulence and unforeseen crises,” the research firm concludes.

In a separate study, Forrester’s State of Customer Obsession Survey, the research firm reports that when enterprise senior decision makers put customers at the center of leadership, strategy, and operations, they’ll see, on average, a 28 percent higher revenue growth and a 43 percent higher retention growth.

Forrester cites the following reasons for implementing a post-sale customer engagement strategy:

• Customers expect it. Following their purchase, B2B buyers expect to have a customer relationship with the seller. Customers expect value throughout their entire journey, which continues long after the initial purchase
• New delivery models require it. Cloud and software-as-a-service business models dominate today’s B2B marketplace. Customers will receive value only if they use the product or service they purchased and will only buy again if they receive value. So organizations need to focus on a proactive post-sale experience that drives adoption and builds loyalty.
• The business depends on it. Revenue from repeat customers far outweighs that coming from new customers. According to a separate Forrester report, 61 percent of revenue in the preceding year for most companies came from existing customers.

A proper post-sale strategy, though, could require companies to better equip their sales, marketing, and customer service personnel.

Chris Regester, chief customer officer of Planhat, told Forrester: “You need a deep understanding of your own product and its capabilities, a deep understanding of your customers’ business and how they make money, and a deep understanding of all of the objectives that your customers have, and between those three things you can triangulate and derive value for your customers.”

There are other obstacles as well. Forrester cites the following three hurdles as the main challenges for post-sale engagement:

1. Silos have a stronghold. More than half (56 percent) of senior managers told Forrester in a separate study that their organizations are siloed. Cross-functionality of sales, services, training, and product management are essential for all elements of marketing, including post-sale customer engagement.
2. Shiny new object syndrome persists. Though they know the value of retaining and growing their existing customer base, many organizations have yet to communicate this value throughout the company. New deals tend to dominate the attention and resources.
3. Poor data quality is a concern. Data is often inaccessible to those who need it. Data collection and usage also suffer from lack of rigor and consistency.

Sales, marketing, and product teams need to work together to ensure customers have value, but in most organizations, these groups still tend to work in silos, according to Forrester, so there is a lack of alignment.

The collaboration among these groups is critical in fostering:

• Customer marketing. Organizations should use a customer life cycle approach that focuses on the engagement program level. This includes helping customers engage with the value network, driving product adoption, and partnering with demand marketing for upselling and cross-selling opportunities.
• Customer success. This ensures that customers adopt and use any offering and achieve expected outcomes from their purchases.
• Customer advocacy. This includes positive social media reviews and other activities that help customers share their experience with the organization’s brand.

Focusing on post-sale engagement sets the stage for outstanding results, Forrester says. Ideally, customers spend more time with the company after the initial sale than during the buying cycle.

Customer lifetime value is one of the most important metrics, the analyst firm says. Successful post-sale engagement ensures that customers receive value from their purchases; continue to do business with the company, which maintains and expands the revenue pool; and become brand advocates, which leads to more profitable relationships over time. And then, these advocates support sales through references and referrals.