Do B2B Better

Many marketing professionals make a distinction between higher involvement categories where the customer engages in more careful consideration of trade-offs, and other categories where customer behavior is driven by emotion, unconscious thought, and habits. This way of looking at customer behavior suggests a false trade-off, given the way customers combine rational and intuitive approaches to decision-making. This is true even in B2B markets, which many assume skew to the more rational side of things and involve less room for our unconscious thoughts and feelings to drive decision-making. But emotions play just as much a role in creating love points along the customer journey for B2B brands as they do for B2C ones. In his excellent book, “Doing B2B Better: Drive Growth Through Game-Changing Customer Experience,” Jim Tincher, CCXP provides an insightful and pragmatic approach to driving business value from your investments in B2B CX that builds off this key insight.

Doing B2B Better introduces the concept of a CX Loyalty Flywheel, where focusing on your Emotional North Star helps drive improved ROI for your CX investments. I love this concept of a growth flywheel, which is the focus of my own book, The CX and Culture Connection: Creating a Growth Flywheel by Approaching Customer Experience and Culture Together. Just as Jim focuses on emotion as essential to cultivate loyalty, I put emotion front and center too, making it the first letter in the C.U.L.T.U.R.E. methodology in my own book, where C stands for “Create an emotionally engaging experience.”

Jim lays out a pragmatic approach to use qualitative and quantitative research to align on the right Emotional North Star for your business, which is key to designing a better experience and measuring the impact of changes to the experience on your business outcomes. Jim recommends starting with qualitative research to discover how customers feel about the CX your company provides and which emotions matter within the experience. He shows how there are a broad set of emotions that companies can focus on, and that getting the choice of which emotions to focus on for your own brand’s Emotional North Star has a significant impact on reinforcing customer loyalty. Jim emphasizes the value of using in depth interviews with a cross-section of customers to uncover emotions and their impact along the customer journey. You can then segment your customers into more and less loyal categories, and see which emotions are more prevalent in driving higher vs. lower loyalty among these customer segments.

Once you have built an initial set of foundational insights, you can follow up with quantitative research to further validate which specific emotions are most predictive of loyalty. There are two key points that Jim is making that I find particularly valuable. First, he emphasizes the importance of understanding the specific emotions that are driving customer behavior, as these will differ across categories and brands. Second, he makes a compelling case for why you should create actionable segments that link these insights to business outcomes. Too often, companies take an approach to personas and journey maps that, while useful in generating insights that inform human centered design efforts, don’t allow for a more data-driven approach to continuous improvement along your Ideate-Test-Scale cycle.

Jim also calls out an important distinction between pain points and love points. He discusses how the research in psychology and consumer behavior shows that pleasant and unpleasant experiences activate different parts of the brain. Reducing pain points along the customer journey doesn’t lead to positive emotions, just reducing the prevalence of negative emotions along the journey. This does have value, as your detractors are more likely to share negative feedback with others. However, to build customer loyalty you need to also reinforce peaks and create new peaks along the customer journey, which activate a different part of the brain associated with positive emotions.

This doesn't mean that reducing customer effort is not important, as it allows you to create an experience where more intuitive decision making and habit building behaviors can occur more often. But to create true customer loyalty around your Emotional North Star, you also need to be intentional about what positive emotions you want to reinforce and what customer behaviors you are looking to drive that activate these emotions. Beyond customer behaviors, you also need to focus on the employee behaviors that reinforce how your CX is congruent with your brand promise.

Yet too many CX programs focus on moving customers from negative to neutral NPS. In “Do B2B Better,” Jim shares that when companies move customers who give a 4, 5, or 6 on NPS surveys to a 7 or more, it returns 9x the organizational value compared to moving detractors to neutral. This finding has many parallels to groundbreaking research at MMA Global, the marketing association where I am a subject matter expert, on your “Moveable Middles.” It turns out your Movable Middles, those customers that have some favorability for your brand but are not yet your most loyal customers, are up to 20x more responsive to advertising. This doesn’t mean that delivering great CX to your personas that are more loyal is not valuable. Rather, these two pieces of evidence reinforce the value of understanding what drives brand favorability and focusing on how to deliver a stronger emotional connection with a broader set of personas to generate future loyalists.

Today, most B2B companies are less mature at experience management compared to B2C companies. In his book, Jim cites data from the Qualtrics XM Institute that 80% of B2B companies are in the lowest two stages of CX maturity, compared to 59% for B2BC companies. The book focuses on what Change Makers do to increase the CX maturity of their companies and drive tangible business outcomes. Change Makers get beyond survey scores, while Hopefuls are more likely to focus just on reporting survey results. Change Makers do more than measure outcomes, as important as that is to create leadership buy-in and sustained support. They also focus more systematically on effective change management techniques.

One of the leading change management practices that Jim calls out in the book is building relationships with finance and data science teams as part of making the case for change. He shows how Change Makers focus on enrolling the right expertise and support to integrate five types of data into their CX analytics (descriptive, sentiment, behavioral, operational, and financial). Jim emphasizes the value of getting beyond experience data from your surveys and text analytics of what customers are thinking, feeling, and saying along the customer journey, to also tap into these other data sources that allow you see what customers are doing and how customer behaviors impact business outcomes.

Jim talks about how you can evolve your CX Tech Stack to get beyond merely measuring your CX through VOC software, to also drive more continuous improvement efforts along a prioritized set of customer sub-journeys via journey analytics and journey orchestration. Most CX programs have either no dashboards to support continuous improvement efforts or show only survey data. More than three-quarters of Change Makers use journey analytics compared to just one quarter of Hopefuls. Change Makers are also more likely to use journey orchestration to trigger interventions based on data along the journey, for example to automate communications or create tickets for employee action. This further reinforces the opportunity to engage your frontline employees to drive behaviors that align to your Emotional North Star. I think of this as reinforcing the connection between your CX and your brand promise.

Do B2B Better provides very useful guidance on how to approach change management to engage your leaders, managers, and frontline employees to overcome barriers to change. One useful approach that Jim lays out in his book is to engage your employees on how to make the connection to customer experience more tangible for their own roles. Roughly 90% of B2B employees don’t interact with customers in person. However, you can still discover ways that these employees impact CX by asking them the question: “If the customer experience were to improve, how would that improve your outcomes?” Note that Jim is not asking about the customer’s outcomes, but the outcomes for these employees’ functions. Jim shows that by being proactive about improving your CX, it translates into customer behaviors that move the needle on the KPIs that functions beyond sales, marketing, and service care about, too.

“Do B2B Better” is an excellent book that I highly recommend reading if you were to choose just a few from among my top list of CX book reviews. I especially like the focus on emotions, more holistic measurement linked to business outcomes, and focusing on culture and change management to reinforce a focus on behaviors that deliver on your brand promise.

I hope you enjoy the book, too, and be sure to check out my podcast episode with Jim coming up in a few weeks on The CX and Culture Connection.