What's One2One Methodology For Driving Customer Relationships At Scale

Think Like Disney, Market Like Netflix And Act Like Zappos (Amazon) To Drive Revenue

I want you to think about your best purchase experiences. Most of the amazing examples are consumer related, because that’s where the real pressure to provide great service resides, but you might have a few B2B experiences that you also thought were exceptional.

What do those experiences all have in common? Do any of your answers sound like this?

• They took the time to get to know what I needed.
• It felt like they knew me, and I felt like I knew someone at the company.
• They had answers to all of my questions, even the silly ones.
• They were easy to get in touch with, whenever and however I needed.
• They hardly ever said “no” to anything.
• It was easy to do business with them.
• Everything happened faster than they promised.
• The communication was consistent and helpful.
• They handled everything associated with the project, even things that were not required of them.

Now ask yourself: Does your company provide experiences like the ones outlined above? Are you easy to do business with? Do you hardly ever say “no?” Do you deliver faster than your customers expect? Do your customers feel like they know someone at your company?

The answer is probably “no” to most of these questions.

The rest of this article is about business transformation. It’s not for everyone. It might not be for you. If you’re not interested in totally transforming your business, click to something else right now. Go ahead, it’s OK. We know this isn’t for everyone.

If you think you’re in a competitive situation with your customers and you need to come out ahead or win every time, this isn’t for you. You can go. If you don’t care about what your customers are saying about your company to their friends, you too can go. If you don’t mind that customers are leaving because you have plenty more coming in, well, you can go too.

Finally, if you’re not interested in doing the hard work to make your company a business that people rave about, it’s OK. We’ll still like you, you’ll still be successful and you’ll still make plenty of money (probably).

But if you want to transform your business into something special, here’s how you do it.

The secret to our One2One Methodology is creating a specific emotional response and a feeling inside people’s bodies that starts when your prospects have their first marketing experience. It continues through all of their sales interactions and their service experience with your company.

It’s hard to do, it does take work and you’ll need your entire company on board. But if you can pull it off, you’ll have a company that performs in the top 1% of all companies worldwide.

One2One In Marketing

It’s worth talking about advocacy here in the marketing part of this conversation, but understand that people might be asking about your business long before they even have any interaction with your company.

That’s why advocacy is so important. If that first conversation doesn’t produce a strong referral, they may never contact you at all.

The first experience you have to craft is that initial advocacy conversation, and the only way to do that proactively is to ensure that your service delivery is remarkable. If your customers love you, they will be your advocates. If they are simply satisfied or, even worse, they are underwhelmed, it’s likely they will never be your raving fans and never be a strong advocate.

You need to know exactly how your customers feel about you. Your Net Promoter Score, customer surveys, interviews and follow-up check-ins are all requirements today.

If your customers are not happy, you need to know it, and you need to be working to fix it.

Assuming your customers are happy, then one of the first places your prospects will have an initial experience with your company is your website.

One2One Starts With Your Website

Is your website built for you or for your prospects? I actually don’t care if you like your site. I only care if your prospects and visitors find it helpful.

Is it built to help them get information? Is it built to talk to specific roles, or industries or challenges facing your prospects? Does it answer their questions? Does it move their buyer journey along? Is it easy to navigate and easy to find information? Can they easily contact you via any method of their choice?

Does it make an emotional connection? Does it disrupt their status quo and get them thinking? Is it clear the action you want them to take on the site and how that will benefit them?

You have 10 seconds to do all of this. How does your site perform?

Once you get past this step and your prospects are interested, your goal is to get them connected, and you do that with content.

The Next Step In One2One Is Your Content

What content are you offering them that answers their questions? Is that content in the right format to match the prospect personas? Do you have content for people at all eight stages of the new buyer journey? Are your content offers interesting enough to get their attention? Are they placed in context to the prospects and the pages they’re visiting on your site?

You must create content that is personalized for each visitor. No, I don’t mean using their name. I mean understanding their challenges, their pains, their role and where they are in their own buyer journey. You need pages on your site and content for each individual.

It should be easy for them to get the content, and they should be happy to share their contact information with you because the content is so rich, the experience so frictionless and the thought you might continue to offer them great content so enticing that they happily give you their email address and more.

If you do this well, you have a new contact. This new person is connected to your company, your message and your story. Now that they are connected, you have to get them to engage, and you do that with nurturing.

Now We Move To One2One Nurture

Unfortunately, this is where most people get it wrong. This is not about pushing or pulling people through a funnel. It should be about continuing the same emotional, constructive and helpful conversation we started talking about earlier.

People who are in the middle of a buyer journey are in control of that journey. You are not. You can attempt to influence, but you will never control. This is why your role is to guide, inform and advise — nothing else.

One2One nurturing is built on the backbone of understanding your prospects in an intimate way and understanding where they are in the buyer journey, then tailoring the nurture messaging and nurture content to each individual prospect.

You might have three personas, but if you have eight buyer journey stages and each persona has three specific challenges that they’re working on, you could end up with over 60 nurture workflows. That’s a lot of work to write, set up and monitor — but that’s what’s required to do One2One.

The better you are at personalizing these experiences, the faster your revenue cycle will spin and the less friction you’ll find in that cycle. Revenue will go up, and so will key marketing metrics, like conversion rates and click-through rates.

Which Brings Us To One2One Sales

Nurture properly and your prospects will want to reach out to talk to you. This is where sales takes over. If your One2One marketing is working well, they’ll trust you more and be more comfortable talking to a salesperson.

But the experience has to continue even after the transition from marketing to sales, and it has to continue to be highly personalized.

In all honesty, it’s easier to personalize the sales process than it is to personalize the marketing execution.

Sales is already about a single person, your prospect or a group of people (all prospects) working with a single salesperson. The challenges come when sales teams think all prospects are created equally or the sales process doesn’t allow for them to get to know the prospect as a person.

Sales won’t be able to move a prospect, they’ll only be able to guide them. The sales process needs to be set up in advance to make providing that one-to-one experience easy.

This means customized content in context to their specific issues, roles, industries and stage in the buyer journey. This means personalized experiences that allow you to get to know them, give them helpful guidance and advice, and establish your role as a trusted advisor, not someone trying to sell them something.

We mentioned at the beginning of this article that one of the ways your prospects judge you is on how easy it seems like it’s going to be to work with you.

This comes out in the sales process. Is it rigid? Is it helpful? Is your salesperson available? How quickly do they respond? Are answers to buying questions filled with “yes, we can do that” or “no, we can’t do that” responses?

Keep that in mind as you create your new, more remarkable and more helpful sales process.

One2One In Service

Did you know that your first touch with a prospect might have nothing to do with your marketing and everything to do with how you service them?

It’s true. Before anyone clicks or calls, they’re probably asking about you. They’re asking friends, family, peers or colleagues, or even looking your reviews up on the web.

That means you had better be taking very good care of your customers right now. If I asked you how many of your customers are advocates, you’d better be able to respond with a high percentage.

If not, you have work to do to provide a more positive service experience. One2One Service means taking the time to ask your clients about their service experience. It means scoring that service experience, so you have data on your clients’ happiness.

Net Promoter Score, client satisfaction scores, percentage of clients who are advocates, reviews and references are all measures of how happy your clients are. Those numbers should be going up every month because you’re actively working to provide them with a better experience.

You’re going to need these advocacy assets for the marketing and sales execution. You’ll need references for sales, client success stories for marketing, reviews on review sites for early-stage buyer journeys and reference reel videos to help shorten the sales cycle.

You’ll find out pretty quickly that without these customer success assets, marketing and sales gets a lot harder.

Driving revenue has never been more complicated. It takes tight orchestration of marketing, sales and customer service.

It takes a solid understanding of the new Cyclonic Buyer Journey™.

It takes the well-thought-out and strategic deployment of tactics across all three areas.

It takes getting data, analytics and metrics for all three areas of the business on a monthly basis and working to move up those numbers every single month.

And it takes leveraging technology to automate those tasks that can be automated without impacting the customer experience, and driving upgrades to that experience with AI and a faster response or a more personalized experience.

Do that and you’ll build a revenue generation machine that drives revenue growth month over month in a predictable, scalable and repeatable way. You’ll have created a truly sustainable competitive advantage that will pay off every month.