Customer-centric selling is a critical SaaS area that drives growth and revenue retention. Pia Heilmann, VP of Sales EMEA at Klaviyo, explains how to master the art of customer-centric selling in an increasingly competitive market.

You need to understand and empathize with your customers, and this applies to all stages of the customer journey. To do this, you need to:

1. Align internally
2. Understand your customers through data
3. Maintain agility and adaptability

We’re all consumers and we all want to be spoken to in a certain way. How can you deliver a differentiated experience that uses the data you have to speak to your customers in the language they want to speak at the time they want to speak?

You need to address the challenges that matter to them in a way that best suits the solution you offer. This isn’t about the product, but about the way they interact with you and your team – from their first interaction on a review site or search to their interaction during renewals as a customer.

Today, every single interaction is more important than ever. Sales has changed massively in the last decade. Combined with increasing consumer expectations, you can no longer think of a single channel or stakeholder, or even two channels or stakeholders.

You need to account for every interaction, starting at the top of the funnel or pre-funnel, throughout the customer lifecycle and beyond. Even churned customers are a valuable source of data.

Let’s look at the three key areas that drive customer-centric sales.

#1: Align internally

In some companies, they call this “corporate jail,” where they lock the senior management team in a room for a few days and try to agree on who the customer is and what value they can offer them. Many companies have a CRO who believes you should sell to a completely different person than the CPO.

This is the first step. You need to make sure you are aligned across the leadership team. Only when you are aligned can you cascade communication downward. You need to determine who is engaging with your company at what stage of the funnel and make sure you have a consistent value proposition.

Every customer interaction is an opportunity to differentiate yourself, so be creative about how you differentiate yourself. When thinking about alignment and differentiation, focus on your ICP and ask yourself these questions:

• How do you take feedback? Do you spend time with customers on the ground to understand how they respond to your messages? Work on it from the top to the bottom of the funnel.
• What topics attract people to your store and retain customers?
• Once you’ve mapped out the customer journey (which you should), how do you ensure your sales team is equipped to navigate it?
• How do you do this on a large scale?

How do you answer these questions? With data.

#2: Understanding the customer through data

Your most valuable tool is a centralized, easy-to-use view of your customers. With all your data in one place, you and your analysts can make smarter decisions about how to target people at the right time, based on behaviors you can identify through trends and analytics.

Technology plays a big role here, but that’s not all. Technology can help you, but you shouldn’t live and die solely by the technology at your disposal. Demographic, behavioral and market insights are great, but you should also survey customers.

Complement your data with case-by-case data. This rich data enables you to make smarter decisions about which organizations to target, when, and how to strengthen your value proposition and align it with a hard metric like revenue.

By combining data from different sources, you can tell a story about the customer and position your solution more effectively.

#3: Maintain agility and adaptability

Your GTM strategy is not something you can set once and forget. It is a dynamic framework that requires you to revisit your original assumptions, continually test your hypotheses, and prove or disprove them. You must be able to make adjustments based on what you hear from the market and see in the data.

You should identify areas of opportunity and challenge and work with your team to better understand them by setting up mechanisms to listen and collect feedback on deals won and lost.

Closed and won deals confirm something you already know. Closed and lost deals allow you to see things you didn’t know. At Klaviyo, we have weekly closed meetings attended by the entire leadership team to provide understanding and empathy and drive change.

Segment your GTM strategy

Klaviyo has an incredibly diverse customer base that requires segmentation of the GTM strategy. You want to match your GTM strategy with remarkable people who can execute those plans, using something like the following sales skills and competencies matrix.

Within each segment you sell to, there are different expectations for team members. For example, with entrepreneurs and small and medium-sized businesses, you evaluate how the product can drive sales so that the buying process goes smoothly.

If you’re at a higher end of the market, expectations are different, so skills need to be different too. How do you best create and respond to an RFP? How do you handle multiple threads internally or manage the complexity of security and compliance?

The art of customer-centric selling doesn’t stop at leveraging customer data. You want to deliver incredible experiences to your customers and understand what customers value. Why do they increase their spend or renew year after year?

You can learn this by:

• Establishment of a customer advisory board
• Use customer surveys to collect information from existing customers about what works and what doesn’t
• Conducting a QBR with customers as a feedback platform and sharing this information with the sales organization so they can better understand where customers are getting value from your product.

By focusing on the customer and the value they get from your product, you can grow, innovate and go beyond the traditional ICP. You can experiment, adapt and establish new segments based on continuous feedback loops with customers.

Key findings

1. In order to enable customer-oriented sales, internal coordination of all functions is necessary.
2. Use the rich data at your disposal to create a narrative that resonates with buyers.
3. Agility and adaptability are key. Identify areas where you can invest more and develop a GTM strategy that will help you grow quickly.
4. Establish frameworks and competency profiles in your organizations and hire the right talent according to these frameworks and competencies.
5. Challenge your sales team to deliver a differentiated experience based on the segment you are selling to.
6. Personalize your outreach and interactions based on the data you collect. Your customer should be at the center of the sale.