How we did it: Upskilling 5000 marketers on the customer .. without telling them
When I joined the Customer Experience team in 2019 our dream was to increase the customer literacy (1) across the company by bringing a Customer Experience (CX) expert to every market. But this wouldn’t work. So we had to pivot to be succesful.
This article belongs to a series of articles where I hope to explain how I’ve collaborated with exceptional talent, teams and organizations to turn theory into action.
Bringing a CX-expert to some markets worked very well, but every market wouldn’t work for two common reasons:
- Many companies just don’t have the opportunity to hire every possible subject matter expert needed
- Even if they hired one, how could this person possibly serve all the teams that wanted support or all the projects that needed it?
We changed our strategy from:
A Customer Experience expert in every market to a little Customer Experience expertise in every marketer.
But, this only helped us change our “target group”, what we had to do next was figure out how to upskill every marketer on CX.
Adding to the complexity was the fact that our internal customers: the marketers, were not only asked to learn CX, they were asked to learn a dozen or dozens different things, then figure out how to combine them all at the same time as they were already doing their excellent marketing job.
A tall order for anyone and too much for our work being efficient, We needed to pivot.
Being customer (marketer) focused we realized two things:
- Being capability centric is not any better than being product centric. If we want to teach our marketers to think through the lens of the customer when selling their products, then we need to think through the lens of the marketer when selling our capabilities.
- Nobody needs to know the name of your capability .. only the owner of the capability cares. What’s important is not that a marketer knows they are using your capability and it has your name on it, what’s important is that they do good work leading to great outcomes.
So we stopped trying to force the knowledge of “doing CX” onto our marketers and started looking for how and where to support them.
We were lucky. Very lucky. At the same time as our challenge was shaping up a different team was working on updates to the company wide marketing strategy framework … so why not?
We joined forces with this progressive and visionary marketing excellence team to put the customer into the marketing framework, but without telling anyone we were doing it. Every marketer following the framework would be doing marketing in the most customer centric way — without even knowing they were.
At the end we had 14 points of collaboration were something we had tested, designed and developed for the organization over the last few years (we knew it would work inside our company) made its way into the marketing strategy, every marketers mindset and work.
And today I would proudly suggest that marketers using this framework are not only industry-leading (pharma) when it comes to customer literacy and maturity, but are leading compared across industries.
The big insight in all of this is that the focus needs to be on the outcome of the work, not the name of the tool. And that having an outsized influence sometimes means stepping back and listening to what the customer/marketer needs, not what you want.
References:
(1). “Customer literacy” is a term I’ve used to describe the maturity of an organization in terms of its capacity to understand, articulate and operationalize key customer centricity concepts. I started using it as our data colleagues were using “data literacy” and I found the same concept to be helpful for the customer
