{Drop the mic. Exit stage left.} Megan Heuer’s quote says it all.

Yesterday, on May 26, 2016, SiriusDecisions presented a research report, “2016 B-to-B Customer Experience Study,” during its 2016 B2B Marketing Conference / Summit shared some areas for improvement for B2B Marketers. The finding I especially relate to is:

• Less than half of b-to-b customers feel their providers offer them the needed value post-sale. As a result, only half of respondents plan to buy more from their current providers.

Aleksander Nowak and I experienced the need to provide post-sale support on the front lines of our reputation management company that we started in 2012. Alek and I had daily involvement in the sales, marketing, operations and support roles of the company. I personally responded to 200 to 400 support tickets per day for two years; the customers must be satisfied!

To deliver an excellent customer experience, my vision was to turn every employee–not just customer service–into experts that could write educational content, respond to emails, and be accessible to customers on the phone. The concept was to integrate sales + marketing with support + operations to achieve a multiplier effect instead of prioritizing one over the other. This concept is analogous to what Alex Bogusky proposes in his book Baked In where he talks about designing products that market themselves. As SiriusDecisions points out, the quality of your customer experience (support mostly) is what causes your B2B products to market themselves.

We made progress toward to realizing our version of “Baked In” in our last company. As author Roger Hamilton explains, life is a series of learning cycles. Next time around we will get closer!