The Power of a Customer-Centric Culture
Creating a customer-centric culture can significantly impact sales performance and growth. Sales organizations that have the strongest customer relationships and attain the highest levels of performance are those that prioritize customer experience.
However, achieving this type of culture requires effort and focus from sales leaders.
What is a customer-centric sales culture?
A customer-centric culture places the customer at the heart of everything the sales organization does.
It means that every decision and action is taken with the customer in mind, and the organization is fully aligned with the customer's needs and expectations.
Why is a customer-centric culture important?
The most successful sales organizations understand the importance of the customer experience. Recent research by Korn Ferry on sales effectiveness shows that there are three main criteria that separate high-performing sales organizations from average or poor performers. These are:
Having a customer-centric culture
Dynamically aligning the selling processes to the customer's path
Providing valuable insights and perspective to buyers
Sales organizations that prioritize a customer-centric culture are about twice as likely to be high performers of sales effectiveness compared to average and low performers.
In fact, over 50% of the highest-performing organizations reported having a customer-centric culture, compared to only 26% of medium performers and 20% of low performers.
What impact does a customer-centric culture have on sales effectiveness?
The above-mentioned research has shown that a customer-centric culture correlates with stronger, deeper relationships with buyers and higher levels of sales process maturity.
Additionally, having a customer-centric culture allows high-performing organizations to move towards being the ‘trusted’ and ‘dynamic’ partner on the Sales Process Relationship Matrix.
Sales Process Relationship Matrix (source: Korn Ferry)
Customer-centric cultures in the study improved win rates by 6.8%, compared to the study’s average win rate of 47.3%. In contrast, sales and process-oriented cultures lead to win rates below average performance.
Sales-oriented cultures, in particular, were found to have the lowest win rates, with only 44.4%, which is 6.1% worse than the study’s average.
Why do process-focused and aggressive sales cultures perform poorly?
Process-focused cultures tend to be internally focused and thereby forget the customer. If there’s too much focus on process rigor and not enough attention on the nature of the modern buyer’s buying behaviors, the actual useful ideas of process maturity don’t pay off.
The subsequent risk of increased seller and buyer misalignment increases. Aggressively sales-oriented cultures don’t always lead to the strongest customer relationships either.
Research shows that aggressive sales cultures are more often associated with the weakest customer relationships in the Sales Relationship Process Matrix.
Only 13% of sales cultures were perceived to be at the top two levels of relationships, Strategic Contributor and Trusted Partner.
How to develop a more customer-centric culture?
Sales force effectiveness leaders can take steps to make their culture more customer-centric. Here are useful steps to consider:
Initiate a discussion about your desired sales culture with your sales and executive team. Develop ways to reinforce the desired culture and keep your leadership team accountable.
Create a formal sales force effectiveness charter that aligns your sales force strategy to the business strategy and includes the principle of making customers the primary design point.
Meet with your customers and start charting their journey. This should be a joint effort with your sales, operations, marketing, and customer service teams.
Assess your current selling processes and align them to the customer's path. Work through different buying and selling scenarios with your customers and make sure your internal selling processes reflect each step of their path.
Align your sales services to the customer's path to drive customer engagement.
Conclusion
In conclusion, a customer-centric culture is crucial to achieving sales effectiveness and growth. Sales organizations must prioritize their customers, align their processes to their customer's paths, and provide valuable insights to buyers to enhance customer experience.
By taking the steps outlined above, sales force effectiveness leaders can create a culture that fosters lasting customer relationships and wins more deals.