Salesforce Marketing Cloud: a customer-centric world
The marketing world has, in the past years, gone through a ground shattering paradigm change, comparable to changing our view from an earth-centered solar system to, well… a sun-centered solar system. Marketing was previously seen as a way to bring customers to my company, so I could sell them what I have. But now, we all understand that marketing is the way to connect with customers, understand their needs and provide them with solutions to their problems. Marketing is not about bringing customers to me anymore, but rather about letting customers know that I’m here for them.
I’ve recently started training to become a Salesforce Marketing Cloud Email Specialist. This has opened my eyes to the enormous potential of this tool (I mean it, it definitely has so many functionalities, along with the possibility of creating your own!), but beyond that I’d say it has reshaped the way I interpret CRM software. This is most certainly not just about adding a person to a database so they can receive newsletters and hope for the best, but rather about the way businesses connect and relate to their raison d’être: customers. This connection should be understood in a rather broad sense: the customer is placed at the center of everything the company does, and everything the company does should contribute to the customer’s experience and engagement.
Let’s take a look at the Salesforce concept of Customer Centric Discovery. This model proposes that you, along with your customer, go through the 4 stages of discovery:
- Know
- Be
- Connect
- Create
Let’s analyze them in detail.
Know
This means identifying and detecting trends in the customer’s industry, details of their business plan and key decision makers in their company. The order is no coincidence, either: it proposes we go from general industry knowledge to highly specific details about the company we are going to help.
Be
Be your customer. Walk in their shoes. Empathise (find common ground, we all have that!), be curious (genuinely so — you need to have a real interest in getting to know their business) and engage. And perhaps most importantly, be your customer’s customer: try to see and do and feel what they do. This means shopping their website and store, observing, talking to others, calling customer service, signing up for their newsletter and paying attention to how all of it makes you feel. Throughout my training I’ve come to realize that paying emotional attention is truly everything.
Connect
Connect with your customers. Tell them about your findings in an empathetic and sincere way. Once you’ve exchanged impressions and experiences, help them organize their challenges, since your findings probably reflect issues of different hierarchy. Here, Salesforce determines 3 levels of issues:
- Tactical/technical
- Overall business consequences
- Personal impact on customers and employees
This aids the prioritization of challenges to be tackled.
Create
Help the customer create a vision for their future. Once the challenges have been identified, you can start creating your vision and the plan to achieve it.
Let’s imagine the following scenario. Patricia owns a shoe store, and she has hired us to set up and tweak their marketing strategy in order to improve their figures and track the performance of their online presence in a dynamic landscape.
First, we should know and become familiar with the industry. For example, we know that retail is constantly evolving towards a digital presence, highly influenced by the pandemic, and that this means retailers now have the extra pressure of not only having and managing stock, but also doing whatever arrangements it takes, whether in-company or not, no make sure the customers receive their orders in a timely manner in what’s known as last mile logistics. They also must account for reverse logistics. You can read more about logistics trends and challenges here and here.
Also, because we’ve been having interviews with different key actors inside the company, we know their business plan is fundamentally oriented towards women, ages 18–45, that they place themselves in an intermediate pricing position and that because of this they anticipate a certain volume of sales.
Specifically, we’ve met Patricia, the owner, who started this business from scratch and for whom this is a very emotional and personal project. This is something we need to consider when we interact with her, especially when we give our feedback.
Then we need to become customers, be in their skin and experience the journey. For this, we’ve created an account on their site and browsed their selection. We’ve discovered that they have opportunities to improve the recommendations that they make, we’ve made a purchase and received it timely, we’ve called customer support just to see if we could exchange or return them, and we visited the stores and observed the dynamics there.
Based on all of the information we’ve gathered, we prepare to connect with Patricia. This means being ready to present our findings in a way that’s empathetic to her emotional connection with the company. Once we’ve all agreed on the main findings, we helped her and her team prioritize the issues that needed attention
With all of this information, we helped Patricia and her team create a vision for the future of the company. And once they’ve settled on one, we can start crafting our plan to achieve it.
I hope this article will help you deepen your understanding of the concept of customer centricity in action. We’ll soon follow up with other articles and tell you how Patricia’s story continued. Stay tuned for more!
