Business
Forrester: Aligning Around The Customer Will Turbocharge Companies’ Growth Engines
Firms with high levels of alignment across customer-facing functions report 2.4x higher revenue growth and 2x higher growth in profitability than those
About this update from Forrester Research, Inc.
[{"type":"text","content":"\nFirms 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\n\n CAMBRIDGE, Mass.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--\nAccording to Forrester’s (Nasdaq: FORR) customer-obsessed growth engine research, outdated short-term growth strategies that focus on extracting value from customers no longer work.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.\n\nWhen 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.\n\nKey insights from the research include:\n\n\nThe 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.\n\n\n\nAlignment 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. Digit...