Forrester: Aligning Around The Customer Will Turbocharge Companies’ Growth Engines
Firms with high levels of alignment across customer-facing functions report 2.4x higher revenue growth and 2x higher growth in profitability than those without alignment
When internal stakeholders and functions fly in formation, everything moves faster — including a company’s growth curve. Not all forms of alignment result in competitive growth, however. Aligning teams around internally focused constructs can result in inefficient processes, excessive collaboration meetings, and irrelevant goals and metrics. To grow revenue, profit, and customer retention efficiently and consistently,
Key insights from the research include:
- The B2B marketing, product, and sales power trio must blend competencies to orient their growth engine to buyer value. Marketing leaders tend to have the most experience applying customer insights; sales leaders tend to have the most practice driving revenue growth; and product and technology leaders tend to be the most well versed in leveraging technology. B2B leaders across these functions should encourage and incentivize cross-functional learning to extend customer competency to all relevant functions.
- Alignment across B2C marketing, CX, and digital functions is necessary to operate at the speed of digital consumers. Today’s customers expect novelty and speed when interacting with brands. As a result, organizations cannot slow down the pace of digital innovation. Digital leaders must work closely with their marketing counterparts to drive a digital culture across the entire organization. Marketing executives represent the voice of the customer — and embody customer attitudes, behaviors, and trends to ground all products, messages, and experiences in customer obsession. By raising digital competencies across key functions, digital teams can propel a behavioral shift toward a customer-led, insights-driven business focused on improving existing and future customer experiences.
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Customer-obsessed companies leverage technology to amp up their growth engine. Firms that have reset their tech strategy to be customer-obsessed see 2.5x revenue growth than those that don’t. Customer-obsessed companies make customer value the
North Star of technology planning to deliver change at the pace of the business and the buyer. This requires business and functional leaders to work together with their technology counterparts to align on priorities of customer-facing teams.
“Achieving internal alignment is much easier when organizations have a common goal,” said
Resources:
- Download Forrester’s customer-obsessed growth engine report (client access required).
- Read more about how to align internal operations around customer value to fuel customer-obsessed growth.
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sagarwal@forrester.com
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