The customer lifecycle refers to the stages a customer goes through from initial awareness of a company to becoming a loyal brand advocate. As a sales ops professional, it’s crucial to understand the customer lifecycle so you can optimize processes and enable sales teams to move prospects through each stage.
The main stages of the lifecycle are:
- Awareness – The prospect becomes aware of your company, often through marketing activities like ads or content. As a sales ops leader, you can analyze marketing campaign performance to see what’s driving the most new leads.
- Interest – The prospect engages with your content and becomes interested in your products/services. Sales ops can track lead behavior like email opens and website visits to gauge interest levels.
- Evaluation – The prospect evaluates your offering and compares it to competitors. Sales ops enables this by making sure sales teams have the right collateral and pricing info handy.
- Purchase – The prospect makes their first purchase! Sales ops plays an important role here by ensuring the sales process runs smoothly.
- Retention – After the first purchase, sales ops focuses on customer success programs to keep them engaged and buying more. You want to move customers into the loyal advocacy stage.
- Advocacy – Your best customers naturally promote your brand through referrals, reviews, and word-of-mouth marketing. Sales ops can nurture these relationships and leverage happy customers as brand advocates.
The customer lifecycle represents a continuous loop rather than a linear sequence, as you need to keep winning customers back to earlier stages. By supporting sales teams throughout each phase, sales ops helps drive revenue growth through acquiring, retaining, and expanding customer relationships over time.
