Forrester: Aligning Around The Customer Will Turbocharge Companies’ Growth Engines
February 21 2023 - 10:00AM
Business Wire
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
According to Forrester’s (Nasdaq: FORR) customer-obsessed growth
engine research, outdated short-term growth strategies that focus
on extracting value from customers no longer work. Dramatic changes
in buyers’ behavior, evolving business models, and technology
advances mandate a shift in how companies design their strategies
and operate their organizations. To drive profitable and
sustainable business growth in this environment, alignment across
sales, marketing, and product in B2B firms and across marketing,
customer experience (CX), and digital in B2C firms is critical to
powering a customer-obsessed growth engine. Additionally,
technology teams need to be in lockstep to quickly address changing
customer needs and market realities.
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, Forrester recommends using
a journey-centric approach to drive alignment and establish aligned
metrics that measure both customer and business value.
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.
- 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 Sharyn Leaver, chief research officer at
Forrester. “A customer-obsessed growth engine aligns functions that
have an outsized impact on customers and growth to set the course
and pace. This research has been designed to help companies attain
alignment across core customer-facing functions as well as reset
their tech strategy to support this customer focus. When
customer-facing and technology functions are in lockstep with each
other, organizations can establish a collective understanding of
customers, create new ways to deliver value, and lean on each
other’s strengths to move faster and more efficiently.”
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.
About Forrester
Forrester (Nasdaq: FORR) is one of the most influential research
and advisory firms in the world. We help leaders across technology,
customer experience, digital, marketing, sales, and product
functions use customer obsession to accelerate growth. Through
Forrester’s proprietary research, consulting, and events, leaders
from around the globe are empowered to be bold at work — to
navigate change and put their customers at the center of their
leadership, strategy, and operations. Our unique insights are
grounded in annual surveys of more than 700,000 consumers, business
leaders, and technology leaders worldwide; rigorous and objective
research methodologies, including Forrester Wave™ evaluations; 100
million real-time feedback votes; and the shared wisdom of our
clients. To learn more, visit Forrester.com.
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Shweta Agarwal sagarwal@forrester.com
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