Despite building yearly growth plans that they believe to be achievable, many B2B organizations fall short. Executives face the frustrating disconnect between ambition and execution, with teams entangled in competing priorities and internal resistance. This “growth gap” often results from:
- Building on quicksand. Chasing quick wins without understanding the journey to exceptional buyer and customer experiences, organizations stumble, miss goals, and require resources that they didn’t foresee.
- Chasing the wrong values. Disconnected teams chase individual metrics, delivering fragmented experiences instead of a unified, value-driven journey.
- The illusion of collaboration. Rushing into planning without shared goals fosters a false sense of collaboration. Silos create plans in isolation, clashing in execution. This lack of strategic coherence fractures experiences.
Why Experience-Fueled Growth Matters
Providing exceptional experiences is a winning growth strategy. Experiences powered high-growth enterprise companies’ successes in 2022 and remained the primary strategy to grow during 2023, as global B2B marketing decision-makers reported in Forrester’s Marketing Survey, 2023. Experience-fueled growth thrives on complete alignment across the organization, with unified customer-obsessed values and operating principles serving as the blueprint for success. This means:
- Marketing aligns initiatives with buyer and customer outcomes. Prioritize digital engagement with user-generated content, intuitive tools, and clear information throughout buyers’ and customers’ journeys to empower independent research and decision-making.
- Product leads a culture of continuous innovation and agility to deliver market-competitive solutions and frictionless experiences. Early involvement with customers helps validate ideas and gather usability insights. Product teams track key metrics, analyze user behavior, and prioritize features based on insights.
- Sales enables buying decisions by leveraging portfolio knowledge and fostering customer-valued personal interactions. Customers can connect their research through conversations with executives, product experts, or industry analysts that sales facilitates. This transforms information into a meaningful solution, solidifying the connection between functional value and emotional appeal.
How To Implement Experience-Fueled Growth
Experience-fueled growth thrives on strategic, incremental advancements. It’s an iterative journey that demands an unwavering commitment to deep customer understanding, cross-team alignment, and continuous optimization of interactions. Marketing leaders can drive this by:
- Charting the customer’s course. Start by truly knowing your customers, their needs, expectations, and pain points. Uncover their values, motivations, and decision-making processes. Think less demographics and more psychographics.
- Aligning around a customer-obsessed vision. Break down silos and build a collaborative culture where every team member prioritizes the customer experience. Foster a shared vision that translates into action across departments.
- Sparking positive customer experiences at every touchpoint. Invest in crafting positive experiences at every stage of the customer journey. From pre-purchase interactions to post-sale support, ensure that each touchpoint reflects your customer-first focus. Help cultivate a sense of community and belonging by making it easy for customers to connect, share knowledge, and support one another.
- Navigating data-driven optimization for continuous growth. Harness the power of data and analytics to track progress, measure impact, and identify areas for refinement. Use customer insights to continuously iterate and optimize your experience strategy.
High-performing leaders prioritize experience-fueled growth, strategically aligning sales, product, marketing, and customer teams around a customer-centric vision. This supports a growth engine powered by technology optimization and deep customer understanding. This data-driven approach builds brand loyalty, boosts buyer and customer reputation, and unlocks consistent, profitable growth in 2024 and beyond.
To learn more, join me at Forrester’s B2B Summit North America, happening in Austin and as a digital experience from May 5–8. My session, “Silos To Synergy: Align Marketing, Sales, And Product For Experience-Fueled Growth,” will help you create differentiated experiences that deliver value to customers and combine strengths across teams to unify and craft these experiences.
