Ensuring customer success is one of the goals of any startup company. But if your customer is another company or business, it can be vastly different than with one person. And that brings in a lot of unique challenges for you. So, how do you get a strong start in guiding your client companies on a successful customer journey? Let’s take a closer look.
What Customer Success Can Give Your B2B Startup Company
The benefits investing in customer success gives B2B companies follows the same reasoning as for individual customers. But with the higher stakes involved, it is still worth noting what these benefits have to offer.
Maintaining A Loyal Customer Base
As Harvard Business Review observed, acquiring new customers can be 25 times more expensive than retaining current ones. And with business-to-business engagements, this can be higher. That is because the sales cycle for B2B is longer than B2C, which means that you have fewer openings to draw the attention of these new customers.
Thus, a lot more rests on nurturing the customers you have in between these cycles. That gives you a steady stream of revenue that will help prop your startup company for the next cycle.
A Successful Customer Brings More Than Just Revenues
Beyond the additional revenues, boosting customer success can bring in more opportunities for your startup. This one has to do with it strengthening your relationship with patrons. When these customers feel that you are there helping them, they become stronger advocates for you.
In the B2B setting, that opportunity becomes more prominent. Many of the clients you have often have connections with other businesses, whether it\’s their customers or associates. As such, they can readily recommend you to those. That gives you more opportunities to expand your own business into new avenues.
On your own, ensuring customer success can also help you refine business strategies. Since you can easily measure customer success, you get a clearer picture of what works and what doesn’t. You can then use these studies to plan your approach for the next set of customers.
The Difference Between B2B And B2C Customer Success
As mentioned earlier, the definition of customer success is different between the business-to-business and business-to-customer environments. By understanding these differences, you can better develop your customer success strategy.
The Size Of The Startup Company Customer Base
The first difference here is the size of your customer base. Since B3B products are very specialized, their intended customers are limited. On the other hand, the revenue generated from each B2B client is significantly higher than that for an individual B2C customer.
That smaller customer base can make it more conducive to implementing a customer success strategy. For one, you can provide more personalized services since you will engage only with a small customer segment. That makes them a lot easier for you to study and better map their journeys.
The Speed Of The Customer Journey
On the other hand, the customer journey will take longer in the B2B environment. That mainly has to do with the fact that you go through multiple stakeholders. While it is indeed easier to map out the general persona of a few businesses, you still need to consider these separate engagements to better plan your overall approach.
That would also require you to continuously monitor how the company uses your product or service. This gives you a clearer picture of the areas where product adoption might be lagging. By actively intervening, you help every department fully utilize your product. That ensures greater success on the part of the client.
Relationship Management
The last difference between B2B and B2C customer success is that the former requires more relationship management. This might come as a surprise, as you would believe that it would be more relevant for human customers.
However, B2C customers are often going for one-off purchases. As such, there is no immediate need to nurture relationships. Only if they make subsequent purchases shall you consider building a relationship with them.
With B2B, the mindset is vastly different. Companies look for products that their teams can use in the long run. You also become more integrated into their business, as you ensure that each team gets to use your product or service to the fullest. For that, you will need to maintain a strong connection with these teams to help them more effectively.
How Your Startup Company Can Help B2B Clients Succeed
As is with its B2C counterpart, ensuring customer success for B2B clients begins with you committing to do it. Here, you should be enthusiastic about supporting client companies in their journeys. For this, your employees also need to have the same mindset.
That will require you to take a closer look at them. Ask what would make employees more enthusiastic about helping customers. Once you understand their motivations, you can develop a plan to boost those. These can be anything from increased incentives to better workloads.
Fulfillment
Once you have met your employees’ needs, they are ready to fulfill the needs of their customers. But they need to understand what exactly those needs are. Here, you might be surprised to know that emotional needs still play a role. Despite you transacting with the company as a whole, you still engage with human stakeholders on a more fundamental level. Understanding what emotions fuel their decisions for the company will help you better meet their specific needs.
One such emotion is satisfaction when they know there is someone to respond to their questions when needed. With a small startup company, however, you might hot have enough personnel for it. That is where we at Virtua Outsourcing come in. Our team of expert agents is ready to fill any gap in your customer response. We can serve as a constant link between you and them, ensuring that you know what they need anytime.
Proactivity
Beyond responding to customers’ immediate needs, your startup business needs to be more proactive in meeting their future ones. The idea is to reduce customer pain even before they feel it. That helps them focus back on ensuring their business’ success.
Virtua Outsourcing is again ready to help you here. Our agents have years of experience in different industries. With their expertise, they can identify potential needs and relay those back to you. They will also provide you with useful insights to build your success strategy for each client.
Help Your Startup Company Clients Succeed With Our Team.
Implementing a B2B customer success strategy is long-term work. And you need the right partner in that journey. Sign up with us today and let us and your startup company guide your clients to success.