ABM TacticsSales Enablement

How Does Customer Experience Impact B2B Demand Generation?

What is the impact of customer experience on B2B demand generation? This has become an urgent question for B2B companies that are trying to step up their lead generation games. Digging into the matter reveals that customer experience (CX) is next to essential for businesses that want to make the most of demand generation.

Customer experience includes every interaction a company has with a customer, from first being aware of the company through contact, purchase, and even post-purchase. A positive customer experience is a powerful enhancer of a company’s reputation and presence in the global market, not to mention its bottom line. Companies that are good at this experience thing outperform their competitors by 80% on the financial metrics that Forrester tracks. I think it’s a safe bet that many of you have experience or have heard of companies that are good at this, too.

Understanding the Link Between Customer Experience and Demand Generation

In the B2B market, there’s an undeniable connection between customer experience and demand generation. A bad experience can stifle not-very-firm leads and call brand integrity into question. Conversely, a good experience with your brand can turn customers into advocates for that brand—which, in turn, makes demand generation work that much better. According to the Harvard Business Review, customers are four times as likely to make a purchase after having a positive experience.

A potent customer experience (CX) strategy can yield an uptick in referrals. When customers are satisfied, they’re much more likely to do some casual, unpaid marketing for your brand, either in person or on social media. And why not? Given how much purchase decision-making has shifted to these informal channels, a great working word-of-mouth relay is one of the safest bets for near-term organic demand generation.

How Does Customer Experience Impact B2B Demand Generation?

In what ways can customer experience affect B2B demand generation? It can influence the whole path to purchase, from the first inklings of awareness, through the stages of consideration and decision. In B2B buying, the actual purchasing agent often does a lot of legwork before talking to a supplier. What you might not know is how pivotal these early brand encounters are to your eventual win-rate ratio.

Furthermore, according to Gartner, 73% of purchasers consider customer experience the vital factor in determining their buying decision. This means businesses cannot afford to ignore the power of exceptional customer experiences. When customers find a journey through a seamless and informative path, engagement is the result—and engagement leads directly to conversion.

As a result, it is very important to integrate customer feedback into your customer experience strategy. Companies that seek out and act on customer feedback see a retention boost of 5.5 times. That means those companies keep 5.5 times more of their customers than similar companies that don’t ask for or don’t act on customer feedback. Why is it working? Because customers really appreciate being asked for their opinion.

Strategies to Enhance Customer Experience for Better Demand Generation

To use customer experience effectively for demand generation, companies must employ a number of strategies:

Personalization: Structure your communications and offerings to meet specific client needs. Yes, in some cases, we can calling this a way of suggesting; in others, we can think of plans like these as being almost segued into the client’s life. I would also add a P.S. here and split hairs: Using conversion rates as a benchmark, we know that everything we’re doing (or not doing) in this realm can and does create outcomes.
Engagement that is Active: Take advantage of platforms to engage customers in an active way. For example, businesses can use social media to link themselves with clients and to promptly assist them with any troublesome issues.
Reliable Interaction: Keep in touch with your consumer at all times during their journey with your brand. We are trying to build trust and keep our brand in their minds. Hearing from us regularly could accomplish this objective.
Systems for gathering and analyzing customer feedback should be in place. These systems will help identify areas needing improvement and will also help validate successful strategies.

The better customer experience, the better demand generation, right? Lee, in turn, helps share what every experience-driven company must know and do. You might not have a nude portrait of yourself defacing an experience like McKinsey does, but you might have a map, a 20% increase in business results, or a reason why companies with strong CX strategies are more likely to achieve nearly twice the rate of share price growth compared to those with weak CX strategies.

Measuring the Impact of Customer Experience on Demand Generation

When it comes to measuring the true impact of customer experience on demand generation, businesses can take a few different approaches. One way is to tie it into the customer journey and see how it moves them along that path. This means understanding what customers experience in each of the stages of the journey and then assessing the impact of that experience on demand generation. Key performance indicators (KPIs) can include:

Client Satisfaction Score (CSS): A direct reflection of customer contentment following interactions.
Net Promoter Score (NPS): Measures how loyal customers are by looking at how likely they are to recommend your services.
Retention Rates: An even larger directive of a positive experience over time is a large retention rate. No one retains large numbers of people doing something they don’t enjoy.

So what gives with the retention rate? How large must it be to indicate a valuable experience?

In addition, examining conversion metrics prior to and subsequent to the implementation of customer experience strategies can uncover effective pathways to demand generation. For example, one company that boosted its net promoter score by 10 points consequently witnessed a 5 percent hike in the demand generation metrics it tracks through Salesforce.

Conclusion

To sum up, the effect of customer experience on generating demand in the B2B sector is huge. It not only controls the path that a buyer takes but also has a hand in the long-lasting relationships and the loyalty to a brand that a buyer might exhibit. Businesses that make it a point to enhance the experience that a customer has with them are almost guaranteed to see that enhance in experience reflected in the amount of demand that they generate. The boosts in demand that businesses generate should lead to boosts in retention and overall profit.

The B2B world is constantly changing, and so is our knowledge of what constitutes an effective customer experience. An effective customer experience today might not be effective tomorrow. In order to generate demand successfully, businesses must not only implement but also evolve their customer experience strategies.