Anyone that has worked with me for any length of time or
whom I have managed knows that, at some point, I will ask them, “Who’s your
customer?” Anybody that does work has a customer, but few people really think
about who their customer really is, or even think in terms of having customers.
Let me be clear: I’m not talking about your company’s
customer, the business or individual to whom your company sells goods or
services. I’m talking about your customer, as an individual employee, as
a team member, or as a manager.
I’ll use myself as an example. At SolidFire, I ran the
demand generation function. The role of demand gen is to develop leads for
sales to pursue. As such, we had two primary customers: inside sales, who would
receive and pursue our leads; and the campaigns team, for whom we managed several
(mostly) digital channels through which to execute their campaigns. We had
secondary customers, like field marketing, who would generate leads through
field events that we would upload, process, and deliver to sales. As a manager,
the members of my team were also my customers, and there are also other
customer relationships that I maintained in that role.
What’s the value of considering those teams, campaigns and
inside sales, as customers, rather than simple collaborative teams or
stakeholders in our activities? Because the concept of a customer carries with
it a set of expectations that are richer, deeper, and more meaningful than a
mere collaborative relationship, and those expectations lead to better outcomes
for everyone involved.
Here’s an example. At one point, we started hearing rumors that
sales was dissatisfied with some types of leads we were providing, even though
we believed these were quality leads. The tension between marketing and sales is
a common situation, so it wasn’t surprising to hear this. But if we could break
down this barrier, both teams could be much more successful in their efforts.
There are a lot of ways I could have handled this problem,
but I decided to view the problem through the lens of a customer-supplier
relationship. If we were a supplier to sales as a customer, a common role in
that relationship is the customer success manager (CSM), whose job is to ensure
that the customer is successful in using the supplier’s product or services. The
CSM role is bilateral: she represents the supplier’s product to the customer,
helping them use it properly and fully; and she is the voice of the customer to
the supplier, helping guide product development to better serve the needs of
the customer.
We needed the equivalent function between demand gen and
inside sales, so we created a CSM type of role and, in fact, we hired an inside
salesperson to staff it. In this role, our CSM (I think we called him a
marketing sales coordinator) had a bilateral role: he represented marketing to
the inside sales team, explaining different types of leads, why they received
them, and how they should pursue them; and represented the sales environment to
marketing, describing which types of leads were working best or worst, and why,
enabling marketing to optimize their campaign efforts.
The result of this change was dramatic. Inside sales came to
view demand gen, and the broader marketing team, as partners in their success.
Sales acceptance rates of marketing leads increased, and sales qualification
rates of accepted leads improved. Would we have achieved the same result by
having a more traditional approach of trying to collaborate between these two
teams? Maybe, but I doubt it. In the same way that customers and suppliers generally
don’t achieve a truly collaborative relationship, marketing and sales
frequently struggle to truly collaborate. By establishing a role whose entire
job is to ensure sales’ success, that changes the relationship measurably.
So, have you started to ask yourself who your customers are
in your job? Does it change how you think about your interworking
relationships? Try it. It can be powerful.
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