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10 Things That Would Happen if All Customer-Facing Disciplines Were Aligned to a Common View of the Customer

view of the customer

Here are 10 things that would happen if product management, product marketing, sales and customer success all had a common view of your target customers. 

  1. There’d be no silos or competing priorities.
  2. There’d be a common understanding of what customers are trying to accomplish, why those business goals and outcomes are critical to their success and how they measure success.
  3. There’d be a common understanding of the biggest obstacles and problems standing in the way of the customers’ goals and the extent to which your solutions in their current form eliminate those obstacles.
  4. Product Management’s guiding light would be the list of customer goals, outcomes and obstacles from largest to smallest impact, and they’d use it to create a portfolio roadmap that synchronizes all product roadmaps to that list so that the whole (of the integrated portfolio) has greater value than the sum of the products.
  5. The backlogs that feed Product Development and design would have clearer direction than they’ve ever had, allowing more innovative solutions with superior usability.
  6. Product Marketing & Sales would operate from the same list as product management to message, market, demo and sell the value of existing solutions relative to those same goals, outcomes and obstacles.
  7. Customer Success through the course of strategic account planning, would continuously feed the funnel of strategic and operational customer priorities, outcomes, obstacles and success metrics that keep everyone aligned.
  8. The confidence of your organization would skyrocket because you’d know you’re building, marketing, selling and delivering measurable customer value with strategic impact.
  9. A higher percentage of your current customers keep paying and more new customers keep buying!
  10. And last but not least, your company would burn a fraction of the cycles it’s currently burning to meet its financial and strategic goals.

Is there more to it than this? Sure, broader market research, competitive landscape, emerging technologies, etc., but this how you build your organization’s core strength for the long haul. Do these things and everything else will fall into place with a lot less hassle. 

Click here if you want to experience the easiest way to learn product management, product marketing, pre-sales demos and customer success with our unique hands-on learning format. Be sure to check out our Product Management Framework that simplifies everything by making customer outcomes the starting point for building, marketing, selling and delivering strategic value.

by John Mansour on August 2, 2023.