Customer-obsessed companies are making this major change

Let me kick off with a clear PSA: Continuity matters. That’s even more true in the B2B space. As a customer, you want your interactions with vendors to be seamless, efficient, and tailored to your unique needs. You want to feel valued and understood at every touchpoint, from your first engagement to ongoing support.

Unfortunately, the reality often falls short of this ideal. The B2B landscape is largely fragmented, with the customer lifecycle journey split across multiple ownership spheres or silos. This is true even in industries like technology, where innovation is a core requirement for success. This disjointed approach is more than an annoyance—it can have real business consequences. As a customer, you’re shuffled through organizational silo after silo as you progress through your lifecycle journey, resulting in frustrating inefficiencies, countless hours wasted repeating yourself, and costly gaps in service.

It’s a bit like calling a company’s service number and being passed from department to department, never quite sure if the next person will have the full context of your issue.

The good news is that it doesn’t have to be this way. Some forward-thinking vendors are making the critical shift toward unified ownership of this lifecycle. They’re breaking down pre-existing internal barriers and implementing processes and platforms to enable seamless handoffs and a 360-degree customer view.

Customers are naturally drawn to vendors that offer unified experiences.

Why the status quo falls short

Traditionally, marketing and customer success operate in separate worlds. Marketing focuses on lead generation, while customer success devotes energy to keeping them happy. But this siloed approach often leaves you caught in the middle. You find yourself repeating information, dealing with disjointed messaging and systems, and wondering if anyone truly understands your unique needs and goals.

When marketing and customer success unite, everything changes. Suddenly, there’s a holistic view of your entire journey. By leveraging data and insights from every interaction, these teams can identify pain points, anticipate your needs, and create a tailored experience.

Fostering a truly unified experience might mean going beyond marketing and customer success to pull in elements from sales, DevOps, security, or other teams. Savvy vendors aren’t erasing the importance of these departments but rather ensuring that any client touchpoints are aligned and uniformly managed.

The perks of having these roles in lockstep

A unified customer lifecycle process should be evident from the very first encounter. Instead of feeling like a line on a lead-gen spreadsheet, you should feel like a valued partner. In this world, dedicated vendor representatives guide you through the noise, providing the personalized information and support you need to make confident decisions.

The partnership doesn’t end when you sign on the dotted line. As you move into adoption and implementation, a great product is only the baseline. To optimize outcomes, you need a team invested in your success. With marketing and customer success in lockstep, you get just that. From smooth onboarding to proactive issue resolution, they’re with you every step of the way, ensuring you achieve the outcomes that matter most to your business.

What’s holding vendors back from unification?

Speaking to my fellow marketers, I know this requires a big leap, both cognitively and practically. It requires a lot of alignment among teams with historically disparate—and sometimes conflicting—objectives and metrics. Inertia is real, and along with the hurdles inherent in breaking down silos, inertia can prevent companies from adopting a unified approach to the customer experience. The more teams involved in customer touchpoints, the more challenging unification will likely be. And yet, the upside is enormous—for both vendors and clients.

On the vendor side, this approach requires a shift in how success is measured. Vanity metrics like lead volume take a back seat to the numbers that truly reflect the customer experience—things like net retention rates, customer satisfaction scores, and the tangible ROI that becomes evident when unification is executed correctly.

Don’t settle for less

The most powerful way for clients to advocate for a more streamlined, unified experience is to vote with their dollars. Don’t settle for the status quo. To be fair, that’s easier said than done right now. The truth is that most B2B companies aren’t there yet. They’re still operating in silos, still focusing on their own metrics rather than yours. But as a customer, you have the power to demand more. You deserve a partner that puts your needs first, understands your journey from end to end, and holds itself accountable to your success.

The future is customer-centric. As innovative B2B companies shift toward this unification, those vendors will break away from the pack and thrive. Other vendors will begin to follow suit, but it will be increasingly difficult to catch up to those bold enough to make the change first.

As you navigate the B2B landscape, look for vendors willing to break the mold—vendors that leverage data to anticipate your needs, measure success through your lens and put your journey at the heart of everything they do. Because when your needs come first, everyone succeeds.

In a unified customer journey, there are no frustrating redundancies, no dropped batons, and no costly gaps in understanding. There’s only a seamless, personalized experience designed around your success. Demand nothing less.

Melissa Puls is chief marketing officer and SVP of customer success at Ivanti.