Reputation to Revenue

Four steps to strengthening B2B customer connections

 

IBM's hot-off-the-press 2010 CEO Study confirms again what solutions marketers already know: getting closer to customers is a strategic priority. An overwhelming 88% of large enterprise CEOs told IBM that getting closer to customers is a top business strategy for the next five years, placing it at the top of the list. An even higher number of the best performing CEOs, 95%, stressed the point.  

Is this really news? Isn't this just Marketing 101?

Well, sort of. The idea is basic, but making it happen, especially in large organizations, is not so easy.

The CEO imperative makes sense. Big company CEOs are struggling mightily, as the IBM report notes, with "the complexity of operating in an increasingly volatile and uncertain world."

In this context, and especially from a B2B perspective, close customer connections are essential to:

• Gain deep insight into customer wants and needs
• Gather input and advice on potential new offerings
• Uncover new opportunities and co-create solutions
• Obtain references, testimonials, and proof of value delivered

Creating and sustaining those trusted connections is extremely difficult, though, when our customers are overwhelmed with their own professional demands and tune out most of our marketing.

Social media brings promise of new and potentially more effective ways to build and maintain vibrant customer connections, both individual and communal -- but understanding how to turn that promise into reality is far from clear.

Meanwhile, face-to-face connections remain essential for key customers, especially at the executive level where so many of us need to be working. But our sales people have less time for relationship building and often little credibility in the executive suite. Beyond sales, it is difficult to know which face-to-face programs are worth funding.

A final challenge, especially for large organizations, is simply managing, coordinating, and building synergies across the wide range of programs and activities designed to strengthen customer connections.

Knowing this is a CEO priority, however, should make it at least a bit easier for marketing leaders to push forward with efforts to do what we all know is so important.

Here are four steps to consider:

1. Do an assessment. It's hard to even keep track of all the ways we're already connecting with customers. Research, sales, services, and delivery are obvious, but we also have thought leadership programs, social media and networks, executive relationship programs, reference management, key account management, customer councils, collaborative solutions development, and probably many more. Take stock of all these initiatives. Look at funding and staffing. Review effectiveness in terms of customer insight and relationship growth. Benchmark the competition. We need a baseline to identify gaps and next steps and to help build a vision of where we need to go.
2. Put someone in charge and build a cross-organizational team. We're already doing this with social media (hopefully!), but customer connections is an even bigger deal. We need someone with the big picture in mind and organizational partners and resources available to improve coordination, integration, and information sharing. We're not building relationships for their own sake, and we're not doing it just for sales either. If no one has accountability to ensure efficiency and effectiveness across the range of relationship-oriented programs, it won't happen.
3. Build executive commitment. The CEO wants to get closer to customers but is the rest of the leadership group on board? Are they setting the right examples and the right tone for their teams? Operationalizing the commitment to customer connections requires real investment and, as important, TIME. We need to push and prod and support senior executives to make the time to work on key relationships, participate in customer councils, and send the message that these initiatives are indeed a top priority.
4. Provide incentives. Companies that take customer satisfaction seriously put serious incentives in place to support the right behavior. Improving customer satisfaction is not the same thing as strengthening customer connections and relationships, but the principle certainly applies (as it usually does with any strategic initiative). Set specific goals, measure results, and then reward the folks in marketing, sales, service, and delivery teams for hitting their relationship growth targets.

What would you add to the list? What's working for you?

Photo credit: Marc_Smith

Lessons from IBM's CIO community program

Everyone selling high value solutions wants to engage C-level executives. 

They're the ultimate decision makers. They can provide deep insight into both their own companies and emerging issues in your markets. They can give you the most powerful references and testimonials. 

Of course they're also the hardest to reach. 

Most B2B solution providers have some sort of executive relationship program, often with some combination of advisory councils, executive briefing centers, executive dinners and seminars, and similar initiatives. And most of these companies struggle mightily to make these programs work and gain substantial value from them.

Karla Bousquet, Director of Executive Client Marketing at IBM, provided some useful insight from IBM's experience during a webinar today organized by Farland Group (full disclosure: I used to work with Farland Group principals when we were all at Truman Company).

Most important, according to Bousquet, is beginning with a clear understanding of what senior executives (CIOs, in this case) truly value:

• Engaging with their peers and extending their professional networks
• Influencing the direction of organizations or initiatives that are important to them
• Gaining justification for their business direction and intuition
• Sharing best practices and lessons learned from peers and experts they trust

They're busy, they don't really care about your products, but they are anxious to learn and grow, most especially with their peers.  

In this context, IBM has taken a strong community approach to serve CIO (and IBM) needs, with four core objectives:

• Establish a shared agenda for engaging with peers and influencing IBM's strategy
• Deliver on IBM's belief that customers play a key role in driving new ideas and innovation
• Provide CIOs with access to experts and expertise across IBM and its partner ecosystem
• Work with CIOs to share success stories that demonstrate business value with CIO contribution

Each of these objectives responds directly to one or more of the things that executives value most. It's difficult to succeed with any community initiative if you don't focus first on providing relevant value to would-be participants. It's doubly difficult with the busiest and most sought-after executives.

To make it work, IBM has developed a tiered program, with three distinct initiatives:

1. Board of Advisors (20-25 CIOs). This is the most strategic of the three, and involves IBM's top executives as peers with CIOs from their most important clients. The primary focus is on providing advice to IBM on the company's strategic direction, something that the participating CIOs have great interest in given their enormous stake in IBM's success.
2. CIO Leadership Exchange (200+ CIOs). Initially an annual event, IBM is working to build more of an ongoing community with this larger group of CIOs from top global companies. The focus here is on sharing of best practices and success stories within a highly accomplished peer group of technology leaders.
3. Center for CIO Leadership (2,000+ CIOs). Focused on advancing the profession, this mission-driven organization, for which IBM provides lead sponsorship, emphasizes the development of leadership skills for current and future CIOs 

The tiered approach helps in organizing IBM resources and responding to different types of CIOs with different levels of relationship to IBM. Underlying each of these programs, though, is a consistent focus on delivering the value that executive participants demand:

• If CIOs want to engage with peers and extend their networks, make sure to prioritize peer exchange and access to experts in every aspect of community and program design
• If CIOs want to influence the direction of your organization, make sure to empower them and allow them to do this, even if it means listening to dissenting views
• If CIOs want to justify their business direction and intuition, create serious opportunities for collaboration and dialogue, along with providing relevant research and perspective
• If CIOs want to share best practices and success stories, ensure a private and safe environment to enable them to do this with relevant and credible peers

It's not rocket science, but it's not easy either. It means letting go of the desire to pitch and sell, and committing to the hard work of listening, facilitation, and collaboration. It means having the patience to emphasize the longer term benefits at some potential expense to short-term gain. Most of all, it means truly putting customer interests first, something we all talk about but all too often fail to deliver.   

Aligning marketing and sales...with what?

Marketing folks in B2B are obsessed with aligning marketing and sales. It's a longstanding pain point, and it always comes to the fore in a down economy. The problem, at least from my humble perspective, is that the discussion tends to rotate around the idea that marketing needs to align more fully with sales.

Four years ago, I wrote this:

The typical approach to marketing-sales alignment emphasizes getting marketing closer to sales through initiatives such as tighter alignment of marketing activities with the sales cycle, better coordination around demand generation and lead management, and allowing sales to have more input into marketing programs and materials. These types of initiatives certainly can be useful, but they risk reinforcing the standard industry view that marketing is ultimately the junior partner of sales and that the alignment problem is mainly one of marketers straying too far from the daily and quarterly demands of the sales force.

Has the discussion really changed? 

Beyond the junior partner idea, another common, unspoken assumption is that sales is just fine where it is. But we know that B2B sales is undergoing changes at least as dramatic as marketing. Globalization, transparency, ecosystem collaboration, the demand for custom solutions, and more are wreaking havoc with the traditional sales process just as they are with marketing. I didn't cover social media and communities in that 2006 article, but clearly they have an enormous impact on sales, too. Witness the seemingly endless number of "sales 2.0" conferences, consultants, and tools flying.

The real challenge is transformation, not just alignment. Of course marketing and sales need to work more closely together, but most of all they need to figure out how to collaborate in serving and attracting customers when their customers are: 

• Overwhelmed with information and choice
• Skeptical of any marketing or sales pitches
• Fully capable of researching solutions on their own
• Actively tapping social networks for insight and reviews far beyond what you can provide

I'm all for more agreement between marketing and sales on which leads matter, how to map marketing to the sales cycle, and where marketing can help most with key accounts. And I'm "traditional" enough to believe that face-to-face marketing and selling continue to be essential even as social media and online communities take center stage for both sales and marketing.

But if we don't look for a larger transformation in how both marketing and sales work -- and work together -- we run the risk of building alignment around a process that no longer fits the real world environment.  

What do you think?

Photo credit: Bill Ward's Brickpile

Social media and thought leadership: The virtuous circle for B2B marketing

As B2B marketers invest more money and time in both thought leadership and social media, they risk missing a great deal of potential benefit they can achieve by bringing the two together in a holistic way.

All too often, at least in my experience in the tech sector, marketers investing in thought leadership view social media primarily as a channel for disseminating content. 

They get the idea that social media is important, and that relying on traditional media channels (including email and websites) to promote their ideas is no longer enough. 

As such, they're beginning to slice and dice thought leadership content into blog posts, tweets, videos, and the like -- and use Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, YouTube, SlideShare and other platforms to promote that content as widely as possible in the social sphere.

This all seems fine, but I think it's far too limited a view.

In fact, isn't this just a more refined version of the same old one-way broadcast mentality? Ponder big thoughts, maybe do some research, put together a presentation or white paper, and then release it to the world and wait for the acclaim and customer inquiries to come rolling in. 

"Going social" with content gives it a better chance of being seen, but a more collaborative approach to understanding customer issues and creating new Points of View before even creating any content greatly raises the chances that customers will actually care.

Socializing every aspect of the thought leadership process requires a more fundamental shift than just reformatting content and creating a longer checklist of places to publish. 

It means letting go of the notion that you have all the good thinking locked inside your organization, that you shouldn't publish anything until it provides all the answers, and that thought leadership is about you talking and customers listening. 

It means taking the zeitgeist of social media seriously, that it's not a "channel" at all, but a way of thinking and doing business based most of all on listening, sharing, and collaborating.

The reality is that lots of great thinking and experience lie outside your organization (to say the least), customers and partners want to collaborate in developing new approaches and solutions, and the best way to demonstrate expertise is to ask the right questions and facilitate ongoing conversation.

The virtuous circle of social media and thought leadership includes five main elements, discussed below:

 

1. Customer and market insight: Tapping social media and networks to dig deeper (and often faster) into the issues your customers and prospects really care about. This can begin as simply as using Google Reader and Google Alerts to follow important online conversations. It can be as sophisticated as using high-end monitoring and analytics services like Radian6 or Nielsen BuzzMetrics, organizing "Innovation Jams" like IBM, or building your own customer communities to ensure a steady flow of deep customer insight.
2. Collaborative Points of View: Rather than rely on a single expert or a purely internal team, why not work with customers and other stakeholders to craft a more relevant and compelling Point of View to undergird thought leadership content? Executive interviews, client roundtables, external working groups, academic and think tank partnerships can all be part of the thinking process, not simply vehicles to disseminate finished products. Social tools make these collaborations far easier and more affordable to manage.
3. Relevant routes to market: This is the area of marketers are already digging into, and with good reason. If you're NOT taking advantage of social tools and networks to disseminate your thought leadership content, you're missing an enormous opportunity to reach key stakeholders where they are increasingly spending their time searching for new ideas. The recent Forbes study, The Rise of the Digital C-Suite, is only one of a multitude of survey reports documenting that executives now rely on online search, video, and social networks as a core information source.  
4. Viral leverage: Your customers and prospects trust independent experts far more than company spokespeople, as Edelman's Trust Barometer shows every year, and gaining their support is far more likely to trigger social media sharing than anything you do directly. Identifying and reaching out constructively to the new influencers in your markets (bloggers, analysts, community managers, etc.) is now essential to thought leadership success.
5. Conversation and community: The old broadcast mode of thought leadership assumed a straight line from polished publication to customer inquiry to sales presentation. In a few rare cases of truly blockbuster ideas, this may even have worked. In today's vastly more networked world, customers want to chew over and debate your ideas at length -- and often without you even present. Inspiring, facilitating, and participating in the conversation is the right goal for thought leadership marketing, and using social platforms and communities is the best way to make this possible. Not incidentally, it's also the best way to gain deep and ongoing customer and market insight, which keeps the whole circle going.

Make sense? What do you think?

Marketing as service: Samsung and Best Buy put customers first

I love this new effort from Samsung to generate helpful user questions and answers on the BestBuy.com. As explained today in Clickz, the "Brand Answers" feature (based on technology from Bazaarvoice) has just finished a five-month trial and almost doubled views of Samsung products on the Best Buy site:

When visitors click a button on the brand's products details pages, a pop-up FAQ feature that's called "Mr. Samsung" appears. Then, visitors can read pages of questions and answers that were previously supplied by other viewers. They can also search the feature to find the content they need or something close to it.

Additionally, users can type in their own questions, which the feature says in a message will be answered within a 16-hour window. The most popular question during the test was, "Can I hang this TV on the wall?"

I love this for three reasons:

• It's all about helping customers make better purchase decisions
• It taps the wisdom of the crowd to generate more, faster, and often better answers than could easily (and affordably) be provided by Samsung employees
• It demonstrates the confidence that both partners share in testing new ideas and opening their doors to put customers first

It's obviously a consumer-focused initiative, but the principals hold true for B2B, don't you think? 

Dell joins the health care discussion

About four years ago, "Dell Hell" entered the lexicon as both shorthand for the firestorm that blogger Jeff Jarvis whipped out by trashing Dell's customer service publicly, and metaphor for big corporations that didn't "get" the new power of social media.

Since then, Dell has made an enormous effort to take social media seriously, and has launched all manner of initiatives to listen to customers online, make the company more transparent, and take a more human and collaborative approach to doing business. Jarvis summarizes Dell's transformation nicely in his new book, What Would Google Do? (a great and provocative read, by the way, if you haven't yet picked it up).

Today's announcement that Dell is launching a new IdeaStorm specifically for health care and life sciences is a perfect example of why the company is so effective now in the social economy.

"As Dell participates in HIMSS this week, one of the largest global healthcare events, we are well aware that there are specific technology needs in the heathcare industry. IdeaStorm for Healthcare and Life Sciences has been created to start the conversation on what Dell can do to address those technology needs and simplify the healthcare IT solutions...Through collaboration, we can all determine the best ways to reduce complexity, save time and reduce costs." 

Self-serving? Of course. Healthcare IT is a huge market and Dell wants as big a piece of it as possible.

But it's enlightened self-interest in a participatory world, and that's what makes it worth comment.

• It's about a big issue affecting millions (billions) of people
• It's a hard issue: how IT can contribute to health care solutions
• It's humble: Dell does not pretend to have all the answers
• It's about facilitating conversation and being open to ideas from any direction
• It's credible, given the background of Dell's substantial efforts to create a more open and collaborative organization 

So kudos to Dell for another strong step forward. For companies looking to move ahead with social media and innovation, Dell has shown again why it's one of the leaders worth studying. 

What do you think?

Wal-Mart seizes the moment with e-health care solution...and lessons are many

Love 'em, or hate 'em, Wal-Mart is clearly among the most innovative and successful companies on the planet over the last half-century. Critics typically point to the company's sheer size and relentless cost cutting as the pillars of Wal-Mart's success, but constant innovation in business model, use of technology, are supply chain management are at least as important. The company also has a finely-tuned understanding of its markets and a willingness to make intelligent bets on the future (witness the current substantial push toward sustainability).

Today's New York Times article on Wal-Mart's new initiative to sell a digital medical records solution to small doctor's office is a perfect example -- and one with any number of lessons to other companies trying to sell high-value packaged solutions.

The initiative is interesting enough: Wal-Mart is partnering with Dell and a small software company, eClinicalWorks, to offer an integrated package to small medical practices at a much lower cost than competitive offers. It's a big opportunity. Few small medical offices today have computerized records, according to The Times, but more than three-quarters of all U.S. physicians work in offices of ten doctors or fewer. Wal-Mart's offering will come through its Sam's Club division, which already counts some 200,000 doctors within its membership.

From a marketing and solutions perspective, though, the initiative suggests a number of lessons that are more widely applicable:

• Think Different. Wal-Mart is clearly not a technology or medical solutions provider, but if the opportunity is big enough and the company has the potential to respond in an innovative way, why not take a look? As Marcus Osborne, senior director for health care business development at Wal-Mart, told The Times, "We're a high-volume, low-cost company. And I would argue that mentality is sorely lacking in the health care industry."
• Think Solutions. Lots of company offer products and services to support digital health records, but, especially for small doctor's offices, the convenience of a packaged solution that includes equipment, software, installation, and ongoing support can be a much more attractive offer. Importantly, in this case, eClinicalWorks provides its software as a service (SaaS), making ongoing support easier and less costly than with traditional installed systems.  
• Think Partners. The new offer is potentially a big win-win-win for all three partners. Wal-Mart gets the expertise and credibility of working with leaders in a market in which it has little experience; Dell and eClinicalWorks get the enormous visibility and channel power of Wal-Mart. None of them could go it alone with anywhere near the impact.
• Think Timing. The new initiative is perfectly timed. Not only is digital health care prominent on the political agenda in Washington, but Obama's stimulus package includes substantial financial incentives for physician's offices to go digital.
• Think Mission. Along with great timing, the initiative has the benefit of serving a larger social mission, improving health care for all. As citizens increasingly look to corporate America to help solve problems and not just make money, tying to a larger mission can only help.
• Think Proof. The initiative has credibility not only because Dell is a leader in small office computers and eClinicalWorks is already providing its service to some 25,000 physicians. As important, Wal-Mart itself has tested and used the system in its own, in-store health clinics over the last two and a half years.

"If Wal-Mart is successful, this could be a game-changer," Dr. David J. Brailer, former national coordinator for health information technology in the Bush administration told The Times. 

For me, it's also a wonderful lesson in solutions marketing. Do you agree?

*For an interview about the initiative with Girish Kuman, CEO of eClinicalWorks, click here. 

Photo credit: D'Arcy Norman

MIT and the new physics of marketing

Today's New York Times had a fascinating article about changes in teaching introductory physics...which got me thinking about the changes we're working through in marketing.

Like most universities, M.I.T. has traditionally taught introductory physics in large lecture halls. Professors worked for years to hone their lectures like the finest stage performers.

"But now," Sara Rimer explains, "with physicists across the country pushing for universities to do a better job of teaching science, M.I.T. has made a striking change."

"The physics department has replaced the traditional large introductory lecture with smaller classes that emphasize hands-on, interactive, collaborative learning..... Already attendance is up and the failure rate has dropped by more than 50 percent.

M.I.T. is not alone. Other universities are changing their ways, among them Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, North Carolina State University, the University of Maryland, the University of Colorado at Boulder, and Harvard. In these institutions, physicists have been pioneering teaching methods drawn from research showing that most students learn fundamental concepts more successfully, and are better able to apply them, through interactive, collaborative, student-centered learning."

So what's the marketing connection?

Marketing, especially for high value business solutions, is becoming more educational than promotional. This is not exactly a news flash; the best business marketers have been working for years to shift from pitching prospective customers on the merits of their products and services to providing insightful and useful information about the business challenges their customers and prospects are facing -- and thereby generating interest and credibility around the solutions they might provide.

To do this well, however, marketing can't just exchange their old-fashioned promotional approach for an old-fashioned lecturing-at-students educational approach. Business buyers today do want to learn about issues, challenges and potential solutions from their would-be suppliers and partners. But they don't just want to listen to you pontificating up on stage. They want to roll up their sleeves, work with their peers, and figure it out together.

So the challenge for marketing, at least in the B2B solutions world, is to take a page from M.I.T.'s book: less large lecture halls, more small seminars; less talking at, more working with. Online and social media tools and channels, of course, make this easier to do. Without a core commitment to "interactive, collaborative, student-centered learning," though, business marketers could be left on stage with declining attendance and an increasing rate of failure.

Photo credit: Nicholasf