Practice what you preach by using what you sell

Digital transformation not only changes an enterprise’s technology, but also its people, processes, and overall culture. With many business-to-business (B2B) organisations embracing this shift, it is essential that they have deep insight into how their products impact their customers.

Like a chef knowing the taste of the food they’ve prepared, it simply makes sense for enterprises to understand the products and services they sell. This is particularly true today, with higher customer standards to meet and unpredictable global events to manage. Enhancing business processes and becoming an Autonomous Digital Enterprise (ADE) goes hand-in-hand with customers’ future success.

By using their own products and services, enterprises can build and maintain trust with customers, particularly when helping them navigate their own digital transformation. Technology solutions can significantly impact the way services are delivered, and how employees work, so prioritising internal stakeholders can help organisations set themselves apart from competitors.

The key benefits

By using their own solutions, organisations can identify tangible business problems that customers might face. When an area for improvement is identified, business leaders can be confident that a market need likely already exists for that solution. Additionally, when an internal stakeholder is an early adopter, they will be able to speak from experience when making recommendations to customers on how to implement and integrate new technology.

Internal stakeholders need their tools and systems to just work. Whether the employees work in customer support, or in other areas, ensuring they have a bug-free and optimised product helps align their work to the goals of the company. One of the biggest struggles when marketing a new product is getting referrals from customers. Even when customers are happy with the product, they may be reluctant to speak about the vendors they work with for fear of disclosing proprietary information. When companies adopt their own software, they can document the benefits and offer first-hand experience.

A matter of trial and error

A number of enterprises use their own products and services first-hand and achieve significant growth. As an organisation offering automation solutions, we understand the need for a product to manage ever-increasing data volumes. As more customers adopt cloud-based SaaS solutions, getting data sources into a data warehouse for loading, processing, and integration—which often requires numerous tools and custom scripting—can be a major pain-point. That can be worsened by scalability limits, which can quickly escalate from an IT problem to a business problem: Data quality issues can jeopardise critical functions like executing payroll on time, and without validation, bad data is not always apparent.

To address this, we turned to our own automation and orchestration platforms to simplify processes across multiple systems of record, making data migration to the cloud possible, while providing the

scalability and elasticity into a data warehouse that modern business demands. Similarly, many businesses are facing challenges that their customers can also relate to, so leveraging internal learnings and improvements reveals new opportunities to help customers.

How to build credibility

Marketing departments spend significant amounts to gather intelligence and better understand their customers. They conduct focus groups and assemble panels of customers as advisory councils to find out where their product stands today, and where the road should lead next. While these are valid strategies to identify and solve customers’ problems, it’s not the same as taking a walk in their shoes.

By using their own solutions and services, and ensuring internal stakeholders understand them thoroughly, enterprises develop the empathy that helps establish credibility with customers, and gain insights that empower them to deliver customer-centric value. Together, those two qualities will distinguish them from the competition and ensure a long-lasting customer relationship that continues to offer reciprocal value.