The Compass: Navigating the Enterprise
Value Chain Selling – Customer Experience (CX)
So far in this series on the Value Chain discipline of the Compass system, we’ve explored how Efficiency helps you do things right, Effectiveness ensures you’re doing the right things, Risk Mitigation protects the business, and Strategic Growth drives new initiatives. Now, we reach the highest level of Value Chain Selling: Customer Experience (CX).
CX is where your offering not only benefits your customer but also enhances their ability to deliver an exceptional experience to their customers. This is a pivotal point in the value chain because when you position your solution as central to delivering superior CX, you tap into a strategic priority that transcends immediate operational improvements.
Why CX is Powerful
In today's market, Customer Experience is more than just a trend—it’s strategic for any business looking to grow and differentiate itself. Companies are increasingly focused on delivering exceptional experiences because that’s how they build loyalty, win new customers, and justify premium pricing.
Here’s why CX is a critical strategy in the Value Chain:
Strategic Growth Enabler: CX is tied directly to a company’s growth strategy, as businesses seek to improve customer satisfaction, loyalty, and retention. By positioning your offering as essential to improving their customer experience, you align yourself with one of their highest priorities.
Supports High Price Points: When your solution improves CX, it justifies premium pricing, not only for your offering but also for your customer's products or services. They can charge more because they’re delivering more to their customers, which in turn allows you to defend higher price points in your deals.
Cross-Organizational Value: Unlike some strategies that might resonate more with certain departments, CX brings value across all levels of the organization. From marketing to customer support, everyone benefits from a solution that enhances the customer experience.
Access to Larger Budgets: The most exciting aspect of positioning your solution around CX is the potential to tap into your customer’s marketing budget—one of the largest and most dynamic funding sources within a business. Companies invest heavily in customer satisfaction because it directly impacts their revenue and market presence.
The Risks of a CX Strategy
While CX offers significant rewards, executing this strategy requires depth and precision. Here are some challenges:
Depth of Understanding: To position your offering effectively, you need a deep understanding of your customer’s business and how they serve their own customers. Without this, you risk missing the mark.
Teamwork: Delivering on CX requires collaboration across teams within your customer’s organization. Having a strategic business sponsor is essential to ensuring alignment and execution. You must be multi-threaded to execute this.
Validation: Your buyer will likely require a proof of concept (POC) or trial period to validate your offering’s impact on their CX. This adds another layer to the sales cycle, requiring careful planning and execution.
Customization: Enhancing CX might mean that your solution needs additional capabilities or customizations to meet the unique needs of your customer’s customer. This requires flexibility in your offering. You also risk adding another layer and time to your sales cycle. However, this investment can yield a more strategic deal.
Elevating the Conversation
When you position your solution at the CX level, you’re not just improving operational efficiency or reducing risk—you’re transforming the way your customer interacts with their own market. This is a far more strategic conversation, one that naturally elevates you to the role of strategic advisor.
The most powerful value proposition is when your offering delivers value across the entire value chain—from Efficiency to CX. When you show how your solution improves internal operations and enhances customer experience, you position yourself as a partner who can deliver exponential growth. This often leads to a dramatic increase in deal size and a significant reduction in the sales cycle.
A Real-World Example
Let’s look at how CX can drive results. One of my clients was in the telecommunications space, providing software to manage customer support systems. Initially, the buyer was focused on improving efficiency in their call center operations. But through deeper discovery, we learned they were also looking for ways to enhance the overall customer journey, from first contact to post-purchase support. By aligning our solution with their CX goals, we positioned our product as central to improving their customers’ experience. Not only did we close a much larger deal, but we also secured a long-term partnership by becoming integral to their customer strategy.
How to Execute a CX Strategy
Know the Customer’s Customer: To execute a CX strategy, you must understand how your customer interacts with their clients. What are their pain points? How can you help them deliver a better experience?
Work Cross-Functionally: Engage with different departments within your customer’s organization—especially marketing and customer service. They’re the ones who live and breathe CX and can become your biggest advocates.
Prove It: Be prepared for a POC or pilot phase to demonstrate the value of your offering. This is especially true at the CX level, where proven results speak louder than promises.
Be Flexible: CX solutions often require customization. Ensure your offering can adapt to meet the unique needs of the customer’s experience strategy.
Call to Action
Are you ready to position your offering as a critical driver of Customer Experience and tap into the powerful resources available at this level? Contact us today to learn how the Compass can help you move beyond operational improvements and deliver value that enhances your customer’s success—and their customers' satisfaction.
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In the next Compass newsletter, we will cover a bonus strategy of the value chain: The Intangible value strategy. There are times where an individual will purchase your offering because of some intangible or personal reason. Having your offering could advance them politically in their organization. Or, solving a problem could help them achieve a personal or professional goal. This value strategy is tricky to execute but if you position it correctly, it can lead to a very short sales cycle. This is a highly effective value strategy at the end of a quarter or year. It has saved me a number of times when I needed one more deal at the end of a quarter.
This was written while listening to ‘Nature’s Ratio’ by Slowly Rolling Camera on repeat.
Artwork by Elwood Howell.