Retaining IoT customers is both an art and a science. Are you applying yesterday’s old school tactics to today’s complex IoT customer acquisition and retention processes? If so, you short sell yourself.
Consider that the art and science of retaining highly connected industrial Internet of Things (IoT) customers requires an army of internal resources. Before, during and, most certainly, post-sale. Do you know who these individuals are?
Undeniably, the pace and cadence of IoT tech advances are starting to flatten organizational business models and hierarchies. In order to retain IoT customers, focus on customer success for customer retention. Implementing that strategy requires leveraging valuable internal resources.
The first order of business when retaining IoT customers is to realize that business development is part of everyone’s job functionality. Stated or not. No one is exempt.
Making IoT customers successful is a complex puzzle. Start by facilitating understanding. Grow understanding into collaboration between employees, managers and leaders. Everyone needs to understand how and where they fit together, like puzzle pieces. When the puzzle is successfully completed, everyone drives value through customers’ organizations.
Action Item: Take the next step. My book of IoT collaboration hacks, Do YOU Mean Business? provides you with 16 actionable exercises which you can put into play today.
Liberate yourself from your professional bias and baggage. Escape from your departmental silo! It’s a big IoT connected world out there. Learn how to identify valuable internal resources essential to the customer success and customer retention processes. Stop short selling yourself and the value you offer to clients.
Next, consider that retaining IoT customers is impeded or even blocked by legacy Us versus Them mindset.
Why? The traditional separation and dedication of the sales function to customer acquisition marginalizes “everyone else.” And guess what? For starters, “everyone else” might have contributed to a more innovative and lucrative solution in the first place. Next, “everyone else” becomes responsible post-sale, for customer success and customer retention. Post-sale is when the sales team tends to abandon the customer.
That type of separation and stratification marginalizes resources. In addition, you continue to short sell your professional value.
Here’s an IoT epiphany for you: customer success and customer retention start during the business development and pre-sale stages of a customer’s lifecycle. That’s business lifecycle management convergence right there for you.
Action item: To learn more about the art and science of retaining IoT customers, sign up for my BrightTALK webinar on June 14.
Finally, the unrelenting pace of IoT environments is a crucible forging a new type of IoT-savvy company.
These successful companies create collaborative and convergent organizational cultures to best serve and retain customers. They are continuously focused on “What’s Next?” Their competition is left in the IoT dust, wondering “What Just Happened?”
Why continue to marginalize or short sell each other? In order to become more successful retaining IoT customers, start becoming more comfortable and conversant collaborating with valuable internal resources. You already know who they are. These folks intimidate you because you feel they are braniacs, engineers, techies, finance people, data scientists. “Those people.”
Action Item: To get yourself unstuck from being intimidated by these incredible resources, download my white paper: New Strategies for Selling to Skeptical Technical Decision Makers.
Create extraordinary and enduring IoT business outcomes.
Retaining IoT customers starts by collaborating with and leveraging valuable internal resources.
Join me on June 14. I’ll start to demystify what you need to do when working with, selling to and managing accounts in smart plant and business settings. Discover what you are missing out on! Become comfortable and conversant in the art and science of IoT customer retention.
What are you waiting for? Sign up for my BrightTALK webinar on June 14.
Babette Ten Haken is a corporate strategist, facilitator, storyteller, coach and speaker. She humanizes the Voice of the Industrial Internet of Things ecosystem. Her focus: customer success for customer retention. Babette’s One Millimeter Mindset workshops and speaking programs help professionals, teams and organizations achieve breakthrough performance results. Contact her today.
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