“What are the four lessons from Do B2B Better?”

Only one in four companies can prove that the work they’re doing to engage customers — usually called a customer experience program, though it goes by other names — drives business results. I call the companies that can Change Makers. Over two hundred hours of interviews with those leaders showed they do four things the rest don’t: they aim their work directly at business outcomes, they measure emotions instead of satisfaction, they connect customer data to behavior and financials, and they treat it as a change management problem.

Aim work directly at business value

Too many organizations validate their customer activities by improved survey scores, without doing the hard work to show that it impacts financials. It is possible to measure customer relationships in a way that shows direct financial value. Most companies never do it. The XM Institute found that only 25% of programs could demonstrate business value. Our own research came out nearly identical: 22%. I call that quarter Change Makers. The other three-quarters are Hopefuls.

Hopefuls run on the belief that better customer survey scores must help. Why would customers give us better scores unless they want to spend more with us? This belief buys you about 18 months. What I repeatedly see is that the survey launches, and executives pay attention for the first six months or so. Then the scores don’t move, and attention drifts. Within 18 months, the survey results have migrated to the appendix — which is where they belong — because they don’t answer the question executives are actually asking: What decisions do I need to make differently to drive growth?

Change Makers start with growth, retention, or cost outcomes and work backward to determine what must change in operations to achieve different outcomes. (“Operations” here is broad: your policies, your relationships, your ordering capabilities — not just the plant.) This creates a flywheel: an investment in the experience → creates emotionally engaged customers → who buy more and stay longer → which strengthens the company.

Starting with the financials ensures that Change Makers continually connect customer feedback to their behaviors, leading executives to lean in when the latest results come out.

Measure emotions, not satisfaction

This is the area where I get the most pushback and confusion. I often hear, “No, Jim, I’m in B2B – you’re thinking B2C.” Let me assure you – emotions are far more important in B2B than B2C. When you make a bad decision as a consumer, you might have a poor meal or a bad hotel stay. When you make a bad B2B decision, it might cost you your job.

Most B2B organizations take B2C hand-me-downs like customer satisfaction and Net Promoter Score, hoping they predict something important. It doesn’t. Satisfaction is a report card. Emotions predict behavior.

In one of my favorite examples, Dow found that enjoyability predicted whether customers ordered more often and at higher volume. (In fact, Dow built an enjoyable complaints process. Not a phrase you expect from a chemical company.) UKG found confidence predicted retention and upsell, as did a manufacturing client of ours. Hagerty found that happiness predicted retention for its members. Different companies, different emotions — you have to find yours.

Connect the data you already have

Maybe 5% of your customers fill out your survey, and almost none of their executives do. Hopefuls use that sliver to tell the company how it’s doing. We know that customers who complete your survey are fundamentally different from those who don’t. Change Makers use survey data as just one small part of their analysis.

Change Makers pair surveys with customers’ behaviors — order patterns, service calls, quote-to-order rates. Most customers never fill out your survey — but every customer has a buying pattern you can analyze. At my first Do B2B Better conference, Sam Wegman of Univar Solutions (the largest chemical distributor in North America) showed how she connected operational and behavioral data, such as product availability and complaints, to predict customer behavior.

Insight isn’t impact. Change management is

Your customers’ decisions are impacted by nearly every department in your company: sales, communications, operations, supply chain, even invoicing. Hopefuls send their reports to their bosses, hoping their bosses will share them with their peers to drive change. Change Makers meet with every department to show what matters most to customers and how that department can improve the business.

Every Change Maker had a deliberate plan to get the rest of the company moving. At my second Do B2B Better conference, each speaker discussed frequent road shows across the organization to engage the entire business around customers. The rhythm varied from quarterly to annual, yet the results were consistent: Change Makers don’t rely on passive communication – they actively engage the entire organization. This is the lesson most programs skip, and the one that decides whether the other three matter.

FAQ

1. What’s the difference between a Change Maker and a Hopeful? Change Makers start with the financial results. They don’t wait for perfect data – they start with the data they have, such as order data, and then connect it to identify leading indicators of financial outcomes. Hopefuls spend their entire time on survey data and text analytics, hoping that improving customer scores will have some business impact.
2. Why doesn’t satisfaction predict growth? Satisfaction was built for high-frequency consumer purchases — retail, restaurants, hotels — where the next purchase is days away, not years. It flags frustrated customers, but it doesn’t predict growth. Thirty years of research shows that satisfied customers defect anyway, yet satisfaction is so intuitive that companies keep using it. Predicting growth requires measuring an item that influences customers’ behavior. See more in the next question.
3. Which emotion should we measure? In B2B, I’ve found that trust and confidence are the two most common emotions that positively influence purchasing decisions. One manufacturing client has discovered that confident customers purchase 25% more than those that are not. Our more recent research (see more in my next blog post) shows that feeling valued as a customer is also a powerful predictor of purchase behavior.
4. Do these lessons apply outside manufacturing? I use manufacturing examples for several reasons – we have 400+ interviews in that space, and I have access to the Advanced Manufacturing Customer Experience Consortium (AMCX) surveys of nearly 10,000 customers. These same results are validated across other B2B industries, such as B2B services and SaaS. The critical component is the structure of the decision-making process, and manufacturing is a far better analogy for these industries than a restaurant or a retailer, which is the world these consumer metrics were built for.
5. Where do I start if we’re a Hopeful today? Your first action is to obtain access to ordering data, ideally spanning three years, and pair it with the last five years of your survey data. If you don’t have that much history, get what you can. Then compare the two to see the relationships between them. Most companies analyze which survey questions move their satisfaction or recommendation score (a technique for identifying which questions influence the score of interest). Change Makers run the same analysis against revenue instead. Convert your order data into growth per account, then find which survey questions best predict that growth. That tells you where in operations to dig deeper — and what to fix first.

Do B2B Better made the case — through interviews with companies already doing it — that you can measure customer relationships in a way that tells executives where to invest to drive growth. In the four years since the book was released, we’ve analyzed 818 interviews with B2B decision-makers, conducted 34 interviews with C-Suite leaders, and added nearly 10,000 survey responses from manufacturing and distribution customers. In my next post, I’ll share what has changed. I’m also creating deeper dive videos for each of the four lessons that you can review at (Jared, please give the link to our videos).