As landing new customers become more difficult with each passing day, brands should ensure that they do not lose on the ones they already have.
Landing a new customer in today’s competitive marketplace has become more complex than ever before. Brands continue to face challenges attracting the target customers as they prospects have more option at their disposal. Brands that will fail to deliver consistent customer support and experience across their various channel will not only witness difficulty in attracting new prospects but will also find a significant increase in their customer churn rate.
To address this situation, brands should take steps to foster relationships with their customers. Instead of solely relying on customer success and account management teams to prevent or reduce churn rate, they should also include Marketing, Support, Sales, and even the Engineering team.
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Here are three factors CMOs should focus on to reduce the customer churn rate:
Try to weed out poor-fit leads
The first step towards reducing the churn rate begins even before a company becomes the customer of the organization. The marketing team should concentrate all their efforts towards generating leads that fit their buyer persona. Yet, sometimes situations may occur that poor-fit leads will be generated despite the best efforts from the marketing team and subsequently transferred to the Sales one.
The problem will only be exacerbated if the sales team isn’t trained or encouraged to weed out poor-fit leads. Also, suppose there is a lack of feedback loop between sales and marketing to decrease the probability of generating poor-fit leads. In that case, the relationship between them will also take a hit. Therefore, it is crucial that the sales team can extensively document the prospects’ requirements during the sales evaluation process. The success and support teams should review the pre-sales qualifications as well as the requirements checklist of the sales team. By taking such extra measures, brands will be able to filter the poor-fit leads.
Maintain product stability
While experimentation still has its place to gather the necessary data for enhancing the product, focusing on releasing the new features at the expense of stability can backfire and increase the churn when a brand expects it the least.
High-performing brands, thus, maintain stability with the addition of new feature releases. CMOs should collaborate with their counterparts to align their priorities and communicate the consequences of making poor choices. They should expose the brand’s product and engineering teams to customer meetings, which will help them to understand the effects of moving too fast.
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Training teams for business acumen
Hiring staff members that promise to delight the customers is one thing. However, whether they have the business acumen to make the customer meetings about the needs and priorities of customers versus the focus on product, feature, and utilization. Also, CMOs should also teach their teams to understand P&L, how to identify key stakeholders beyond the immediate sponsors as well as how a budgeting process works.
Equipping their customer success and account management teams with business acumen will go a long way in strengthening their relationships with customers, will increase loyalty, and thus decrease the probability of customer churn.
Customer retention isn’t only the job of marketing and sales. It is the combined effort of all departments in the brands. By creating a companywide culture and behavioral mindset dedicated to customer success, CMOs can meet the foundational requirements of reducing churn and in-process hope to strengthen customer relationships and gain loyalty.
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