How do you shift your team's mentality from sales to customer experience?

Jeremy - am just chewing through this right now in an assignment with a major Australian telco. A few suggestions.

The key I think is to realise that - with all the will in the world - a leopard won't change it's spots, so you have to prove to sales that positive CX will actually assist them to achieve their sales targets, and that this can happen in the short term if approached the right way. Typically organisations run in what I call "parallel universes" - lots of rhetoric from the top about the importance of CX yet invariably everyone up the line in the sales division is goaled on revenue, orders, margin etc.

So - what are some approaches we've tried that seem to hit the goals of both CX and sales targets at the same time?

Customer Workshops: We built a process of inviting individual customers in to meet with a cross functional group (ie sales, service, billing, admin etc), for a structured discussion around their CX, and what we could do to improve this. It was non-confrontational (with no members of the account team there), and was preceded by questionnaires to both the customer and the account team. Getting folk who are traditionally non-customer facing to actually engage directly with customers really pushed the CX game forward - HOWEVER from a "sales hitting their targets" perspective in EACH workshop through a structured questioning approach we uncovered AT LEAST 2 new opportunities for the sales team, based on the progressive understanding of the customers' business issues. The workshops are now being enshrined - score 1 for the CX team helping sales to achieve their targets, whilst also progressing the CX agenda throughout the organisation.

Customer Health Map: We devised a taxonomy whereby customers could be classified as to the "health" of their account. This came out of the workshops, as we realised that some customers were in such a bad place service wise that, despite any approaches from the sales team, they had no interest at all in new purchases until the service issues were resolved. At the other end of the scale, there were many very strong brand advocates who were willing to be reference sites, that would bolster approaches from sales into new prospects of a similar business profile. Classifying customers as to where they sat on the health map continuum was easy - just ask them, and ask the account teams, and do a comparison. Even this exercise is beneficial because it helps the account teams understand where their accounts are at - but most importantly the whole health map program allowed the organisation to come up with SPECIFIC PLANS - linked to where the customer was on the health map profile - so that (if necessary after remediation) sales could "SELL MORE STUFF" to each customer. (The CX upside was bringing organisation wide attention to the concept of customer health, which has also been widely beneficial.) We're in the process now of bolstering this methodology to include social media monitoring as a key input into understanding customer health.

We unfurled a number of other initiatives, but hopefully the above illustrate the approach. We can "preach" to sales all we like - but at the end of the day we have to speak their language and help them get the results they need.

Hope this helps!

Bruce