Dear Revenue Teams: Hyper Relevance is All That Matters Now

Dear revenue team leaders,

With everything going on in the world, marketing, sales, and customer success strategies are completely turned upside down. Business travel is non-existent, everyone is working from home, and the strategies that many thought they were executing against over the next two quarters have completely gone out the window.

This leads to many questions: What should we be doing instead? How do we keep generating pipeline and closing deals? How do we keep our customers happy and successful? What are we even allowed to do right now?

The short answer to all of these questions is this: Be hyper relevant.

It’s all that matters now.

Marketing, sales, and customer teams should be taking stock daily of what is going on in their business environment and crafting relevant and timely messages to be as helpful as possible. It’s all about being empathetic, showing your value, and offering partnership to your customers and prospects.

The days of setting and forgetting a strategy are long gone.

So, how can customer-facing teams adapt to a hyper relevant strategy?

How to Stay Hyper Relevant in 7 Steps

1. Listen to the market. Are you having thoughtful conversations with your customers and prospects and really understanding what they care about right now? Are you reading industry trends to better understand the immediate and longer-term implications of what is going on and applying these thoughts to your messaging?
2. Collect inputs across your internal teams. Make sure your marketing, sales, and customer success leaders are meeting daily. Have one person from each team take turns sharing what you’re hearing from all sides and work together to agree on the most timely and hyper relevant topics your customers and prospects care about.
3. Craft your story. Based on what everyone is hearing from the market, have your marketing team craft the collective message that is the most timely and helpful for your customers and prospects. This part is critical. By taking this extra step, you are ensuring that your company is going out with a consistent message and you’re being as helpful as you possibly can. One company, one voice.
4. Train your teams. Spend the extra time to get your teams together to thoroughly explain the messaging you are rolling out. Make sure they truly understand so they can be as thoughtful as possible when speaking to your customers and prospects. Helping them understand and believe in the messaging allows them to be genuine in their conversations.
5. Orchestrate your approach. There is no shortage of technology employed by marketing, sales, and customer success teams. Make sure your messaging is adjusted everywhere. Marketing automation platforms, sales engagement platforms, customer success platforms, website, sending programs; everywhere.
6. Measure the response. Take the time to understand if your message is resonating on a regular basis. Are you seeing increased social engagement, web traffic, SDR engagement, sales traction, customer satisfaction/product usage? These are just a few of the things that you can and should be looking at to measure how relevant you truly are.
7. Optimize and repeat: If you’re not seeing increases in your metrics, then consider going back to the market and your field teams to understand where you can iterate and improve. If you are seeing a positive effect from the messaging, what kind of small tests or optimizations can you incorporate to make it even better?

There are a lot of unknowns for all of us during this time. The world changes quickly, and one meaningful way we can serve our customers is to help them adapt. Hyper relevance is key. Your business model and customer base will determine how often you should be iterating: For some companies, you might evaluate every six months; others may need to consider changes in the market on a day-to-day basis (especially in times like these).

By taking the time to be hyper relevant, you’re demonstrating your commitment to customers and ability to innovate. Stay humble. Stay hungry.

Good luck out there.