It’s All About the Customer Experience

At INBOUND in Boston, HubSpot CEO and Founder, Brian Halligan, shared how today, people simply don’t trust marketers, sellers, social media…and the list goes on and on.

So who do prospective customers trust then?

“They trust your customers. That’s the only people they trust these days and that’s it,” said Brian. “Word of mouth is becoming a more powerful channel, whether I like it or not, than sales and marketing,” he explained.

That means we have to do better at creating a great customer experience.

If we want customers to help us tell our story, we HAVE to have a great end-to-end customer experience. Customers aren’t just an output; customers are a part of our ecosystem and are integral to our growth.

“We’re in a big era shift, similar to the shift I saw when we first started HubSpot,” said Brian. “The Internet has really shifted under our feet. We’ve moved from an era where the best product always wins, to where the best customer experience always wins.”

“Customer Experience Wins”

So if we see our areas of focus as attracting, engaging, and delighting our customers (see the flywheel above)—where then should we put our emphasis? And, a closely related question, where is our best return?

The answer in the past might have been activities that fall under “attract.” “The sales rep and the prospect had the same information, at the same time, and so it behooved you as a marketer to create as much information as possible, and pull people in with that,” explained Brian.

Today, we see another shift, he explained. The most effective activities are those that fall under “delight,” and so that’s where the biggest return for us.

If you want to create that delightful experience, your experience has to be 10 times LIGHTER than the competition.

Here are just a few questions to get the conversation started when it comes to leveraging customers to feed your growth in this way:

• Are sales AND marketing in a position where they work towards customer delight (or are they just looking to close deals)?

• What can you do now to maximize delight and word of mouth with current customers?

• Is your pricing plan designed to close or to delight?

• Do customers pay you as they gain more value?

• What can you do to remove friction in the process prospects have with you? (“Friction is the enemy.”)

• What can you do to remove friction in the process customers have with you?

• What resources can you move towards investments in delighting customers? Consider making that move!