Sales revenue leaders might be the customer’s first impression of a company. They might be calming voices when a customer has questions—or is confused, angry, or frustrated. Either way, sales leaders and others directly responsible for generating revenue have traditionally played a pivotal role when it comes to customers’ experiences with a company.
Sales revenue leaders expect to play an important role in the customer experience (CX) in the coming years, even as it increasingly moves online, but other executives are less sure. Only 46% of executives think revenue leaders will play a role in their organization’s CX strategy, according to a survey of 1,091 business executives by Harvard Business Review Analytic Services in December 2020. But of the 85 revenue leaders included in that survey, 75% expect to participate in CX strategy planning.
Harvard Business Review Analytic Services’ research shows that this expectation gap between revenue leaders and their colleagues is much more pronounced than with other executive roles. For instance, expectations are almost perfectly aligned between human resources, product development, and finance executives and their peers.
Some executives may fail to appreciate that revenue leaders can offer unique insights into CX due to their frequent interaction with customers. Executives may also overlook the fact that revenue leaders have access to critical information that can improve CX throught the enterprise. New technologies, for instance, give revenue leaders data about customer activity from the very beginning of the sales process. Executives from other parts of the company can use this data for predictive modeling like product-level forecasts and to better understand customer behavior.
H I G H L I G H T S:
- The sales experience is the first mile of the customer experience (CX) highway
- Revenue leaders have access to critical information that can improve CX through the enterprise.
- Executives from other parts of the company should not wait until the end of the sales process to engage the sales revenue team.
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This article is posted at salesforce.com
