[PRACTICE NOTE] Reimagining Marketing and Sales for Experiential Commerce

Synopsis. In the era of Experiential Commerce, aside from the ubiquitous “funnel”, one thing that unifies marketing and sales organizations is that neither has visibility or accountability for the quality of the end-to-end purchasing journey or customer lifecycle. Often resulting in fragmentation and inconsistency, these disconnects can create excessive effort and frustration for customers as they contemplate purchasing, loyalty and other lifecycle decisions. The stakes are high—the cumulative impact of negative commercial interactions on the overall customer relationship can be uncertain, and the long-term effects on brand perception can be difficult to measure, exposing companies to potentially costly setbacks to revenue performance.

Key Question.

Setting aside the entire customer lifecycle for a moment, are marketing and sales themselves causing customer pain and frustration even before the purchase is complete?

What’s the Situation?

Marketing and sales organizations have typically operated in functional silos, with each focusing on different stages of the purchasing journey. In this common corporate construct, each function may have different views on customer needs, leading to its own tactical priorities, ways of working, and KPIs to hit. Overlaps, friction, and high-risk hand-offs become predictable outcomes of this functional division, potentially causing effort and frustration for customers very early in the customer lifecycle. 

Adding another layer of complexity, marketing and sales interactions are often seen as separate from the broader customer experience. With their collective focus on transactional campaigns and sales calls, these interactions are typically not well orchestrated into holistic, integrated commercial journeys. Whether an in-person pitch, a phone call, an email blast, or a digital ad, these interactions can come across as highly variable, influenced by the techniques and stratagems of individual brand managers and sales reps, which can leave customers feeling disoriented as they are forced to navigate through disjointed paths to purchase.

Why Does This Matter?

With the advent of Experiential Commerce, the transition of value exchange from tangible goods to intangible interactions, where the customer relationship is driven increasingly by the quality of experiences rather than solely by products and brand factors. In this model, customers increasingly prioritize exceptional, personalized experiences alongside traditional considerations like product quality, price, and brand reputation when making purchasing and loyalty decisions. It reflects a fundamental shift in consumer preferences and behavior, where emotional connections and memorable interactions are key determinants of value.

Additionally, customer expectations are now set by customer experience "outliers" from outside of traditional industry boundaries and shaped by word-of-mouth feedback from peers on social media and review platforms, a fragmented approach is no longer acceptable. This new paradigm acknowledges that the purchasing journey is no longer linear and that customers interact with companies across a wide range of touchpoints—both digital and physical. Every interaction, including commercial interactions, can leave customers with brand impressions ranging from delightful to confusing to undesirable, with each having corresponding effects as triggers or barriers to purchasing behaviors. 

Marketing and sales must also no longer exist through isolated campaigns and sales call transactions but by creating orchestrated, high-value experiences that lead to long-term win-win relationships. Also, gone are the days when these interactions were seen as separate from the broader customer experience. This is consistent with customer preferences as, according to Salesforce, 84% of customers say that the experience a company provides is as important as its products and services, and 70% of buying experiences are based on how the customer feels they are being treated.  

Key Issue. Unfortunately, despite these truths, many companies continue to view marketing and sales interactions as immune from the idea of delivering high-quality customer experiences.

What CXEs Do: Turn "Ideal Experiences" into Unique Selling Propositions

Rather than being viewed as a threat, Experiential Commerce offers CMOs, modern marketers, sales leaders and other commercial practitioners the opportunity to realign their marketing and selling capabilities to the way customers are evaluating options and making purchasing decisions. Following the practices of Customer Excellence Enterprises (CXEs), rather than through product factors and brand factors alone, companies can create and offer differentiated value to customers by combining product, brand, and experiential factors into unique selling propositions that are truly unique. This type of change cannot be done superficially, it must be done structurally, starting with the rewiring ways of working to consistently deliver high-quality commercial experiences that resonate with customers at scale. 

To ensure that marketing and sales interactions are consistently high-quality while still allowing for flexibility, companies need to focus on training their teams based on key principles that define their brand-aligned Ideal Experience. The Ideal Experience concept serves as a documented vision and set of guiding principles that can be applied to every customer interaction, ensuring that marketers, sales representatives and other customer-facing functions maintain the brand’s core values while tailoring their approach to individual customer needs.

Focusing on the key interaction attributes of the Ideal Experience—such as empathy, simplicity, personalization, and transparency—companies can empower their teams to create genuine, meaningful connections with customers with distinctive points of differentiation at the point of engagement and sale. These principles should be integrated into every interaction and touchpoint in the customer journey, from initial marketing campaigns to post-sale follow-ups, ensuring that customers feel heard, understood, and valued at every stage. This requires not only crafting Ideal Experiences but also targeted training and up-skilling to embed this ideal into the ways of working for marketers and sales representatives.

Key Issue. Sales and marketing training often leans heavily on developing functional skills, such as crafting product messaging, articulating brand benefits, and mastering sales techniques. While these are essential, this focus can lead to a transactional approach that prioritizes promoting features and benefits over delivering meaningful customer experiences. 

What CXEs Do: Apply Blended Training for Brand-Aligned Interactions

Customer Excellence Enterprises recognize that true competitive advantage lies in creating emotionally resonant, brand-aligned experiences across the customer lifecycle, inclusive of the purchasing journey. These very different types of companies supplement functional marketing and sales training with an intentional focus on cultivating skills and behaviors that deliver interactions that embody the brand’s identity and values. This dual-focus training ensures that every touchpoint reinforces the brand’s identity and commercial outcomes. Through intention and design, the act of training marketers and sales reps not only on what to do, but on how to do it, and why it matters, CXEs build a culture with supporting systems and structures that reinforce excellence across every interaction.

Disney serves as a prime example of this holistic approach. While Cast Members (Disney employees) receive comprehensive functional training to perform their specific roles—such as operating attractions, managing queues, or serving food—they are also meticulously trained to uphold Disney’s standards for guest interactions. Disney defines these standards through attributes such as friendliness, attention to detail, and a commitment to creating magical moments. For instance, Cast Members are taught to make eye contact, smile warmly, and proactively assist guests to ensure that every interaction reflects Disney’s promise of exceptional customer service.

Key Issue. In the pursuit of consistently delivering high-quality experiences and Ideal Experiences at scale, rigid rules and overly structured approaches to sales and marketing interactions can stifle creativity and spontaneity—the qualities that often differentiate exceptional sales representatives and marketers from average ones.

What CXEs Do: Balance Structured Selling Systems with Individual Empowerment

The highest performing marketing, sales and commercial teams rely heavily on processes and systems to maintain high standards and consistency in their efforts. Well-defined systems help ensure that messaging, branding, and customer interactions are aligned across teams and channels, reducing variability and delivering a predictable, high-quality experience. While a consistent, brand-aligned standard of interaction can pay commercial dividends, CXEs recognize the effectiveness of commercial interactions often hinge on the ability of individual reps to respond to customer needs in real-time, in a way that feels authentic and personalized to the unique context of each customer. Overly strict guidelines or inflexible scripts can remove that sense of spontaneity and thinking on your feet capacity that good sales reps and marketers seem to have.

At the core of this practice, CXEs excel at striking the right balance between structured systems and empowering their marketing and sales teams to deliver personalized, brand-aligned experiences. These organizations implement systems and processes as frameworks rather than rigid rules. Particularly relevant in the digital arena, it is fairly routine for marketers to follow standardized workflows for campaign planning and execution, and sales reps may rely on playbooks that outline best practices for each stage of the purchasing journey. However, these frameworks are designed with flexibility, allowing teams to tailor their approaches to individual customer needs. With the capacity to strike the balance, CXEs ensure that every touchpoint reflects the brand’s promise while being relevant to the customer’s specific situation. Rather than being disruptive and full of effort and frustration for customers, this approach fosters trust, loyalty, and differentiation, creating a purchasing journey that is not only consistent but also commercially impactful.

Key Takeaways

• In Experiential Commerce, where every touchpoint matters, companies must facilitate high-quality purchasing journeys that align with customer expectations and deliver commercial results
• This shift requires a fundamental change in how companies approach marketing, sales and commercial interactions.
• While consistency is crucial, companies must avoid constraining marketers and sales reps with overly rigid rules that limit their ability to connect with customers in an authentic and personalized manner
• Training marketers and sales reps on the principles of the Ideal Experience—and empowering them to apply those principles in context—can create more engaging, effective interactions that drive sales and marketing performance

Questions to Consider

1. Are our sales, marketing, and commercial systems designed to deliver seamless and personalized experiences across all interactions and the entire customer lifecycle?
   
2. Do we measure success using customer-centric performance indicators (CPIs) that reflect customer success and goal attainment, rather than relying solely on traditional campaign or transaction-focused KPIs?
3. How effectively do our teams collaborate to align the entire purchasing journey with customer expectations while driving commercial results?
   
   

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