An effective customer-first strategy goes beyond providing good customer service. It’s all about adapting your whole process to meet customer needs.
Putting the customer first reduces churn and builds loyalty that competitors can’t break with discounts alone.
In this article, you’ll learn what customer-first means and five steps to build it into your business. You’ll also learn how to use your customer relationship management (CRM) software to make a buyer-oriented approach possible.
Key takeaways from customer-first strategy
Customer-first strategies put customer needs and satisfaction at the center of their processes.
Retention improves when you solve customer problems before they escalate and show customers they matter beyond the initial sale.
Customer experience becomes your competitive advantage when you identify what matters most to customers and build your business around delivering it.
Pipedrive’s custom fields, pipeline management and insights help you implement customer-first strategies without complex systems – try it free for 14 days.
What is a customer-first strategy?
A customer-first strategy (or customer-centric strategy) means designing your business processes around customer needs.
With a customer-first approach, small businesses identify problems before customers know they exist.
Your SMB can adjust how you sell, deliver and support customers so they spend less time feeling frustrated and more time getting value.
Example: A small SaaS company notices five customers asking the same setup question within a week. Instead of waiting for more support tickets, it improves the user experience by adding a tool tip to the software interface. When customers reach that point, a small pop-up appears explaining what to do.
How a customer-first strategy builds lasting success
Knowing the benefits of a customer-first strategy from the outset helps you measure what’s working and stay focused.
Here’s what each benefit means for your bottom line.
Increased customer retention and loyalty
Retention turns one-time buyers into repeat customers.
SMBs usually have to invest in acquisition costs for new customers. You must capture their attention, educate them about your product and nurture them.
Meanwhile, existing customers already know your value. They buy from you more often and spend more per purchase. That familiarity creates a reliable income instead of constantly chasing new deals.
In Genesys’ 2025 State of Customer Experience report, CX (customer experience) leaders rank retention among the most valuable factors in a customer interaction.
Customer-first strategies naturally turn buyers into loyal customers. When you solve problems before they escalate and show customers they matter, buyers won’t leave. Your competitors won’t win them over with discounts alone.
Example: A small marketing agency notices a client’s campaign underperforming mid-month. Instead of waiting for the client to complain, the agency reaches out right away. Marketers propose an adjustment to the strategy and send updates. The client renews their contract without thinking of competitor offerings.
Higher customer lifetime value
Customer lifetime value is how much value you get from a customer over your entire relationship.
Customer-first strategies increase this value in many ways. Satisfied customers are more likely to:
Upgrade to premium services or higher tiers (upsell)
Add complementary products to their purchase (cross-sell)
Increase order size or project scope over time
When customers succeed with your help, they organically expand the relationship. You don’t need to prepare a sales pitch or push product recommendations. Customers want to try more of your products because you solve their pain points.
Example: An accounting firm onboards a startup client for basic bookkeeping at $500 monthly. As the client grows, they add tax preparation services to their account. Two years later, they also need fractional advisory work. That same loyal startup now generates $3,000 monthly.
Stronger competitive advantage
Exceptional customer experience becomes your differentiator when competitors offer similar products at similar prices.
Most buyers can find comparable solutions anywhere. Pricing strategy and product features matter less than making customers feel understood and supported.
According to Front’s State of Customer Expectations 2025, 60% of customers are willing to pay more for faster response times.
Example: A web development shop pitches against two larger, cheaper agencies for a website redesign. The small shop wins by proposing solutions to the client’s checkout problems. Price becomes secondary to feeling understood.
Better word-of-mouth and referrals
Word-of-mouth works because consumers will trust their friends more than ads.
Referred customers show up ready to buy. They already believe you’re good because someone they know and trust recommended you.
A customer-first strategy can turn customers into promoters of your brand. When you solve real problems, people want to share what works for them with their peers.
Example: An accounting office fixes a tax filing error for a restaurant on a tight deadline. The restaurant owners tell this to two others at a networking event. Both restaurant owners switch to the same accountant within weeks.
More informed business decisions
With a customer-first strategy, you ask customers what they need so you can build a product they’ll actually use.
Every sales conversation and feedback form reveals what matters to your buyers. This insight allows you to spend money and time on functionalities or features they’ll actually use.
Moreover, you’ll prioritize solving what’s causing the most friction in their processes, not what you think would be nice to have.
Example: A consulting firm plans to build an online course to scale its expertise. Before investing months in development, the company asks existing clients what format would help most. Clients reveal they want templates and checklists, not videos. The firm creates a template library in two weeks instead of a three-month course nobody wants.
5 steps to create a customer-first strategy
Building a customer-first strategy happens in stages: start by understanding where you are, move to execution and end with ongoing improvement.
Here’s your step-by-step approach to customer prioritization.
1. Assess, plan and set goals to fix what’s losing you customers
Knowing your current state lets you focus on what’s driving churn instead of tackling random issues.
Start by honestly looking at your current customer relationships. Ask yourself:
What’s your customer churn each quarter?
How long does the average customer stay?
What’s your repeat purchase rate?
Write these numbers down and talk to your sales and customer support team. They know where buyers get frustrated, what objections arise and what complaints they repeat.
Ask your team members what keeps coming up in client interactions so that you can build and improve your services around these needs.
In Pipedrive’s CRM deal detail view, you can check all related information for a specific client – including notes, emails and any scheduled activity.
Check lost deals from the last six months. Read through the notes and emails to spot patterns in why they left.
Next, filter for your longest-standing customers. Look at their original deal details to see what they had in common when they signed.
Finally, compare the two groups. The difference between customers who stay and those who leave shows you what a “good fit” for your business looks like.
Once you know where you stand, set specific goals using the SMART framework.
Some examples of SMART goals include:
Reduce churn from 15% to 10% in six months
Boost repeat purchase rate from 30% to 45% within 12 months
Decrease response time to inquiries from 24 hours to 4 hours in three months
Prioritize what to tackle first by picking the biggest pain point that affects the most customers.
2. Understand what your customers actually need and value
Knowing what customers need allows you to serve them well and provide more value.
Gather data from every customer touchpoint in your omnichannel approach (e.g., sales calls, support tickets, onboarding sessions, renewal conversations and customer feedback) and the channels you use (e.g., email, social media, website form and online reviews).
You’ll often find that sales calls show you what prospects truly care about before buying. Support tickets and email replies show you what customers struggle with after purchase and what questions keep coming up.
Look for patterns in two areas: what customers value most and what pain points they’re trying to solve.
Group customers who share similar values and struggles to create your customer personas. Here are typical examples of what SMB personas might look like:
Persona | Information |
Growth-focused Gina | Business type: 15-person insurance agency What she values: Speed and scalability Pain point: Current tools can’t keep up with rapid growth |
Budget-conscious Bob | Business type: Solo B2B consultant What he values: Low cost and simplicity Pain point: Can’t afford enterprise software but needs professional tools |
Efficiency-seeking Emma | Business type: 50-person call center What she values: Automation and reporting Pain point: The team spends hours on manual data entry |
Once you’ve identified your personas, track them in Pipedrive using custom fields. Add a field called “Customer Persona” and tag each deal as “Growth-focused”, “Budget-conscious” and “Efficiency-seeking”.
Add another “Primary pain point” field to capture their specific struggle. This can be a text field, so you can be as specific as you want.
Later, when you’ve identified the main pain points you solve for customers, you can change to multiple options.
When you filter deals by persona, you see which types convert fastest and stay longest. You know which pain points your product solves best.
That information tells you where to focus your sales and marketing campaign efforts, allowing you to create more personalized experiences.
3. Align teams to deliver consistent customer experiences
Customer success happens when every team works toward the same goal: helping customers win.
Sales reps need to know what type of customer struggles so they can find better product-prospect fits. Support or development teams must understand what reps promised during the sale to deliver on it.
Empowering employees with access to customer data means they can make informed decisions in real time. When teams have open communication channels and share details freely, they avoid informational silos and can take smarter, more aligned actions.
To align your teams, create workflows with shared customer visibility so they can all access the same information.
In Pipedrive, your teams can work from a single source of truth. Sales can log notes from discovery calls and support adds updates when solving customer tickets. You can also use mentions (e.g., @luis, @valentina, @victoria) in notes to loop in other teams.
Use the activities feature to create accountability for outreach or customer requests. For example:
Sales can tag development with questions about feasibility
Support can flag customer success when someone’s ready to expand
Alignment means your teams reinforce each other instead of working at cross purposes. When you build a customer-first culture, customer success becomes everyone’s job.
Download your guide to managing teams and scaling sales
4. Build your after-sales strategy to keep customers engaged
Create a structured follow-up process to stay connected with customers after they buy.
After closing a deal, you need to show appreciation to your customers. If you only remember them during renewal points, you risk them churning soon after.
To prevent churn, schedule touchpoints at key moments post-sale:
Description | |
Immediately after the purchase | Action: Send a self-service resource (e.g., quick start guide, setup checklist or introductory video). |
30 days in | Action: Request specific feedback on their experience so far. Purpose: Catch customer issues early before they turn into churn. |
90 days in | Action: Check on results and progress.
Purpose: Deepens the customer relationship and identifies other sales opportunities (what else could help them?). |
On Pipedrive’s Growth plan and higher, you can automate email sequences to check on customers periodically.
For instance, set up a welcome email to go out immediately after a deal moves to “Won”. After that, schedule the other email check-ins.
In your CRM system, create a separate pipeline for customer success. Move contacts through stages like “Onboarding”, “Actively using” and “Expansion-ready”.
Consistency builds stronger customer relationships. When you check in regularly, customers know you care about their success beyond the initial sale. Pipedrive automations make this consistency effortless.
5. Measure and improve results based on insights
You need to measure if your customer obsession efforts are paying off and refine as needed.
To do this, pick sales metrics that directly tie to the goals you set in step one. Common customer-first metrics include customer satisfaction (CSAT) and net promoter scores (NPS).
If your goal was to reduce churn, watch the retention rate and reasons for cancellation. If your goal is faster response times, measure that.
Review these metrics monthly and check for patterns. While one bad month doesn’t give you enough information to make decisions, three months of underperforming metrics clearly indicate that you need to act.
You can check your sales performance with Pipedrive’s Insights. The AI-powered feature lets you create reports using plain language.
Type what you want to see (e.g., “show me conversion rates by persona”) and the AI will build the report for you. You can also create a sales funnel conversion report to check where deals are stalling.
If you created custom fields for your buyer personas, filter by conversion rates per persona. You may learn that “budget-conscious” customers have a conversion rate of 30% while “growth-focused” customers convert at 10%.
Use this insight to refine your SMB sales strategy. In this case, double down on what’s working by targeting more budget-conscious customers and adjust your approach for growth-focused ones.
3 examples of brands using a customer-first strategy
Customer-first strategies live in your business processes, not only in your mission statement.
Here are three companies that built their processes around customers.
Scratchpay identifies friction points and removes them
Scratchpay is a financing product from Scratch Financial that helps pet owners afford veterinary care.
Pet owners often face challenges when their pets need medical care, as most financing options require large down payments and complex applications.
Scratchpay is a payment provider that removes those barriers. You need only $15 as a down payment to start. Eligibility checks don’t affect your credit score, while some plans offer no interest if you pay the full balance within six months.
The company identified what stops people from getting care for their pets:
High down payments
Credit checks
Interest charges
Then, Scratchpay removed those points of friction for its users. Over 17,000 veterinary practices now accept its plans, helping pet owners afford necessary treatment without choosing between their budget and their animal’s health.
Pipedrive in action: Scratchpay integrated Kixie and Zapier with Pipedrive to keep all customer information in one place. Reps could check all call recordings and clinic details in the customer history, which led to better customer support. High ratings for its phone support went from 62% to 70%. Moreover, onboarding time for new reps dropped from two days to three hours.
360 Payments learns customer needs before pitching solutions
360 Payments provides payment processing solutions for businesses across the US.
CEO Lisa Coyle and her team prioritize understanding customers before discussing payment solutions. She learns about business decisions and challenges, growth plans and what matters personally to each client:
Most companies lead with features and pricing. 360 Payments starts by learning who the company serves.
The solutions 360 Payments proposes fit each customer’s situation to create a more personalized service.
Pipedrive in action: 360 Payments logs personal details about customers in Pipedrive’s notes. During follow-ups, reps reference these details so customers feel heard and they can build rapport. With this system in place, net income grew 298% in two years.
DashThis eliminates handoffs between sales and support
DashThis is a marketing reporting software for agencies and marketers that uses dashboards to pull data from many sources.
Most reporting tools charge per user seat and adding access for a designer or copywriter means paying for another seat.
DashThis charges per dashboard instead. The entire team accesses every client report at no additional cost. Account managers, strategists, designers and copywriters all see the same data without license limits.
Plus, the company assigns one account manager to handle sales, onboarding and ongoing support. Clients work with the same person throughout the relationship.
This efficient approach deepens the customer relationship and allows for better customer service. There’s no handoff between departments, so customers don’t need to repeat the same information to different people.
Pipedrive in action: DashThis needed a scalable tool to help account managers maintain long-term relationships. With Pipedrive, reps knew what actions to take next to close a deal. The teams also shared client information and assigned tasks from a single hub, improving both churn and conversion rates.
Final thoughts
Successful businesses use a customer-first strategy to drive retention, referrals and revenue growth. When you understand customers’ needs and build your processes around solving them, buyers remain loyal and spend more.
Start by assessing where you stand with current customers. Build processes that solve their real problems and measure what’s working to refine your approach.
Pipedrive’s CRM helps you track customer data, automate touchpoints and measure results in one place. Try it free for 14 days to build a customer-first business.
