Selling Your Risk-Adverse Boss on Customer Engagement

Being the little guy isn't always a bad thing

Happy Thursday, y’all! We’ve been working our way through the top objections to, and benefits from launching customer engagement initiatives. This will continue on Tuesday, then on June 27th, I’ll provide a Masterclass on building an online community. That issue will be a bit longer than most, and will include a few surprises (and maybe even a few familiar faces).

But for now, let’s return to examining the top objections that companies have to investing in customer engagement. Today’s objection is…limited resources.

Whenever a company considers launching a new initiative, the issue of resources will invariably come up. Investing in customer engagement is no different. There’s typically two main resource-based arguments offered against investing in customer engagement:

Argument #1: “We can’t afford a dedicated customer engagement team”

Solution: Integrate customer engagement into existing business functions.

A lesson I learned early on in my consulting career is that companies don’t want to invest in new initiatives if they can help it. But they will invest in your suggestion if you can show management how it can optimize existing business functions in order to achieve better results. Marketing, sales and customer service are all examples of departments that can leverage customer engagement to improve results without needing additional human resources.

Marketing: Leverage content creation in order to drive customer engagement. For instance, an email newsletter. Or a blog. Both are drivers of potential leads, which can then go to…

Sales: Sales can take leads generated from customer engagement efforts by the content strategy, and offer personalized follow-ups.

Customer service: Your CS team can build better customer engagement into its support efforts, leveraging support issues as a way to collect better feedback from customers through engagement both directly and after the support experience.

Argument #2: “We don’t have the resources we will need to have an effective customer engagement strategy”

Solution: Start small and let results dictate how quickly you scale

In the previous point we mentioned how customer engagement could be integrated into your business’ existing functions and teams, such as marketing, sales and customer support.

Yet the contrarian (you know the one) at your company would say that’s exactly why you can’t afford to invest in customer engagement! Look at all that extra time and expense and resources it would take to integrate customer engagement efforts in all those departments!

To the contrarian, you offer the pilot program. Pick one department, and nail down the customer engagement process with that department and team, then scale your efforts out to other areas of your business. This is where limited resources can actually be a benefit to your customer engagement efforts; It forces you to compartmentalize your customer engagement initiative. While this will limit its broader impact on your business, it will also make it easier to measure, track and understand exactly what that impact is.

Once you nail down the customer engagement process from design to execution to measurement, then you will have a much better understanding of the actual impact your initiative is having on your business. Equipped with that knowledge, you can then point to an actual positive impact on your business from engaging your customers, and that helps justify the additional resources you can use to roll out the initiative to other areas of your business. Taking what you learned from implementing customer engagement in the first department, you can integrate similar efforts in additional departments at a lower expense, with added financial impact A win-win!

A real-world example of where businesses are currently using pilot programs? Generative AI. Companies are integrating AI into their business processes selectively, and then scaling out to other areas as results dictate. In fact, the latest research from Gartner shows that over half of companies surveyed are now either piloting AI or rolling it out into production within their organizations. That’s a 300% increase over numbers reported by Gartner in the spring of 2023. Expect to see coverage of how AI can impact your company’s customer engagement efforts in a future issue of Backstage Pass.

So if your boss is skittish on integrating customer engagement into your company, suggest a pilot program where you roll out engagement efforts in only one select area of your company. Here’s the benefits:

Cost is reduced.

Fewer resources are required.

Processes are easier to manage and adjust.

Results are easier to track.

Risk is reduced.

Starting small lets you nail down the customer engagement process from design, implementation, execution and measurement. Then you can scale out to other areas of your business. This helps you realize even better results as the roll out continues.

Start small with one platform or channel (LinkedIn, Twitter, Email marketing), and nail down the customer engagement process. Learn how to engage customers on that platform or via that channel.

Track your results, figure out what worked, and what didn’t.

Then when you move to the second platform or channel, your customer engagement efforts aren’t starting at zero. You’re starting at say a 3 or 4 out of 10 by applying what you learned on the first platform/channel. On the second attempt, you will learn a few more things, and the results will be even better.

The third time you use customer engagement, you’ll be starting out from a 5 or 6 instead of zero. Growth and results compound with each new attempt. It all starts by leaning into what you thought was a detriment (limited resources), and leveraging it as a strength.

But perhaps more than that, it starts with embracing change, and not letting the fear of failure keep you and your business from moving forward.

In 2011, I attended the first Content Marketing World in Cleveland, OH. I actually got to host a live #Blogchat from the Rock N Roll Hall of Fame as part of CMW. The event’s closing keynote was Kevin Smith. I was never really a fan of Smith, but I loved his talk. I didn’t realize it, but Smith was actually quite the content creator, he was heavily into podcasting at the time, along with the other assorted TV shows and movies he was working on.

His talk was about taking risks. He framed it for the CMW audience in terms of content creation and trying new things in the space. He said that whenever we come up with an idea that we want to try, we will inevitably always have a friend or colleague who will ask ‘Why?’ Why do we want to try that? Have we considered what happens if it fails? What if something goes wrong???

In this world, there’s no shortage of people who will tell us that our idea won’t work. Who will ask ‘Why?’.

Smith then said “We all have people who ask ‘Why?’ about our ideas, but what we need is more people who hear our idea, and ask ‘Why the f*ck not?’

Everyone has a plan for what happens when their idea fails. How many of us have a plan for when our idea is a wild success?

Stop planning for failure, think about what happens if you land on more success than you could imagine.

A week from today I’ll cover a company that landed on more success than it could handle. Overnight, it went from being a small business, to a national brand. It was a huge rush of success that the brand was NOT ready for. The brand addressed the issue, pivoted, and in the process created one of the best examples ever of customer engagement. We’ll talk about that more in 7 days.

Have a wonderful weekend!

Mack