Don’t you just love opening those emails with sales pitches and special offers inside? Doesn’t it make you eager to get the next email from the same vendor? No?
Obviously not. Yet many companies use their email newsletter to barrage their customers and prospects with offers and promotions. Maybe if the email is from RueLaLa, addressed at eager fashionistas, it will get a decent open rate. After all, RueLaLa is all about special offers to begin with. If you’re selling complex B2B products, repeated offers and promotions will result in a very high “always ignore” rate. That’s the proportion of subscribers who got sick of your email offers long ago, but don’t want to bother to open one and scroll down and find the fine print to unsubscribe. So they just ignore you. Every time.
Stop sending offers. Resist the urge to add a promotion to every missive. Remember that the call to action does not need to be “buy now,” and not even “try now.” Send them something valuable instead. So valuable, that they’ll be more likely to open the next email. Here are 10 ideas of valuable things to send.
- Short (15-20 minute) webinar by one or more of your clients about how they solved a problem your other customers are likely to face
- Your own webinars that inform about a common topics of interest to your audience (Hint: your product is NOT a common topic of interest)
- Invitation and discount to attend an event where you will be present
- Summary of big takeaways from a conference that someone in your organization attended
- 3rd party articles that are relevant to your prospects
- White papers (your own or 3rd parties) that actually inform rather than advertise
- Video interview with one of your execs sharing their ideas, views, insights (but NOT promoting your company)
- Blog entries by your executives, employees, or 3rd parties that are relevant to your audiences
- Explanation of something happening in the market and about which there may be confusion
- New ideas or best practices gleaned from your customers and other internal and external subject matter experts.
There are countless others, of course. Please share ones you’ve sent or received that have been particularly valuable.
Customer centricity is well over a decade old. Companies have gotten better at tracking customer information, incorporating customer input into product design, and identifying customer needs in their sales and marketing messages. Despite these advances, the most frequent complaint by decision-makers involved in complex purchases is that vendors don’t listen, don’t understand their problems, and don’t convincingly articulate value.
Something is obviously missing from all that customer-centric activity.
Just about every discussion of being customer centric focuses on “understanding customer needs”. Unfortunately, most vendors focus on their customers’ needs, but not on the way their customers do business. That may sound like a subtle difference. It’s not. A focus on needs often misses the context for those needs. That’s important, because the context, not the need, determines value.
Let me repeat that. The CONTEXT, not the need, determines value.
Only by focusing on needs in context can you be truly, uniquely relevant. To become more relevant and valuable to customers (and grow revenue), find the needs that matter most now within the context of your customer’s internal and external business situation, and to which you can add the greatest value. Then sell and fulfill your offering in the way best suited to the customer’s way of doing business.
The highly popular Net Promoter Scoring (NPS) customer satisfaction measure (originally created by Bain & Co.) has gained broad adoption in the last five years. Customers’ likelihood to recommend you to others is a great measure of their satisfaction and loyalty. Unfortunately, Net Promoter Scoring limits visibility and can lead your customer satisfaction initiatives astray.
There are two key issues with traditional NPS:
1. It asks customers to predict their own behavior. The standard NPS question is, “Would you recommend us?” Many companies have found that customers say they WOULD recommend, but over half of those that say they would, don’t.
2. A Net Promoter Score is not actionable alone. Simply knowing how much customers expect to recommend you doesn’t provide clues as to how to improve their loyalty and word of mouth.
Despite these drawbacks, the core concept of NPS is an important one: Happy customers create new business. The key to leveraging this concept is to tweak NPS to ask more actionable questions, and then incorporate it into a broader customer intelligence effort.
Read more in my recent Beyond NPS brief...
Idea Design’s blog about asking is right on – and applies to businesses as much as to charities. At the end are three points that may as well have been written for businesses – here they are, with business terms inserted:
“1. Be where your [customers and prospects] are. Hang out with them. Learn their language and be relevant to them.
2. If you want to [close deals] sooner or later you are going to have to ask for [the sale].
3. And when you do ask, ask in a way that is appropriate to your [customer]. ”
In a business, these apply to the sales reps, and to the rest of your organization. Get your messages into the places customers look to for information (note – first place they look is not your website). Your marketing, services, and product development / design staff should be attending the same events, reading the same publications, and participating in the same discussions on and off-line that your target audiences do.
Most sales people don’t have much trouble asking for a sale – but they often fail to do their homework and communicate why their offer should matter to the customer in the customer’s terms. That makes the ask inappropriate. To increase the frequency of yeses, increaes the relevance of your offers. To make that relevance natural, as Idea Design suggests, hang out with the customers.
I hate hate hate pricing my consulting work. There is always a tension between the value it brings to the client (which gurus like Alan Weiss will tell you is the only thing that matters), the reality of the client’s budget, the amount of effort and expertise required, internal company politics, etc.
So even before reading the article about a coffee shop that does not post prices, I had tried handing the pricing reigns to clients by asking some version of, “What do you think this work should cost, given the value you expect it will bring?”
Results? Some clients did not want to name a number, and I ended up pricing the project as usual. Some DID name a price: always higher than I would have quoted. The difference: Clients who were comfortable naming a price already knew me and had worked with my firm before. It seems letting your customer set the price may be a great model when:
1. The customer is well-informed about the product and its value, or can become informed easily and quickly as in the case of the coffee shop. (This is the basis for free trials: Assume the customer will assign little or no value when first encountering a product. Depend on familiarity leading customers to agree with you on price.)
2. The customer has had some exposure to competing products and prices, and has a basis for comparing the relative worth of your product vs. the others.
3. The customer has a relationship with you, even if only a momentary one (note in the video that the cafe owner describes people “looking him in the eye and stating what they think is fair”)
Share your thoughts on if and when letting customers set the price is the right thing to do.
Given that segmentation is the cornerstone of marketing, I am often surprised at how little of it B-to-B companies actually do. Company size and geography are often the only criteria for segmentation, with industry being a distant third. There are other ways to slice and dice. A few ideas:
1. Look at customer characteristics such as tolerance for risk, speed of technology adoption, core business driver (are they technology-driven, customer-driven, supply-chain driven, etc.) – some may be much more likely to buy from you than others.
2. Separate customers with different levels of familiarity and experience with your company and products – your objectives and sales approach will be very different.
3. Split companies up by specific situations, business processes, or use-cases that are common to an industry or a business models. The solutions and services you offer them will vary drastically.
4. Define audiences based on their roles and responsibilities within an organization or within the decision-making process. Also consider segmenting by organization structure and culture – highly hierarchical, process-focused companies need a different sale then flat and agile organizations.
5. This seems painfully obvious, but then again, its rarely done: Segment based on actual customer objectives. This one is difficult and takes account-specific research to determine who fits where. So we tend to just assume that all companies in an industry, experiencing the same pressures (you know, the slide that says “Increased competition, Decreasing customer loyalty / ease of switching, regulation and/or deregulation, growing complexity of IT environment..”) must have the same objectives. But in fact, some are looking to get bought, some want to grow internationally, some want to raise revenue from existing customers, while other are focused on boosting profitability.
Most companies also under-utilize the insights that segmentation provies. Next time we’ll explore the uses of segment characteristics in various parts of your organization.
Comment and share some innovative segmentation criteria you’ve seen used by BtoB companies.
More than once over the last few months, I’ve had the unsettling experience of meeting with a potential client, planning to discuss how I can help their company, only to to discover they are no longer with their company. As sign of the times, to be sure. Moving contacts create challenges at existing accounts, but opportunities elsewhere. So what does one do when your key contact at an account suddenly isn’t at the account?
A few thoughts:
Be proactive – diversify: Cultivate multiple relationships within each account. Follow up with people you meet in meetings or who collaborate with you during and after the sale. Ask your sponsor or champion to make a few introductions, particularly in different departments or organizations than their own.
Follow: Social networking tools make it easy to keep in touch as people move about. Take note of status changes that may indicate a new position, employment status, or company.
Help: This is a time when active networking and introductions are more valuable than ever – offer them. Whether its a potential employer, employee, or partner, introductions are a great way to create value and build relationships.
Follow Up: Make sure customers who have bought from you before know how you can help them deliver results as they take on new roles in new organizations.
Systematize: Your top reps already do all of the above. Consider spiffs or other programs to make sure the new contacts make it from personal spreadsheets into your CRM systems. Help all reps get proactive by measuring the breadth of contacts at accounts on an on-going basis. Provide simple tools like email templates to make re-connecting easier.
Comment and share your own ideas on maintaining sales contacts in these tumultuous times.
After 2 days at the Sales 2.0 conference, I fear we may be on the same path CRM took in its early days. Though some of the new tools are great, and MUCH easier to adopt, there is too much talk of technology, not enough about behavior and cultural changes. All things 2.0 are really about interaction and collaboration with customers. And that requires a change in mindset.
Basic example of 2.0 principles in action, that actually requires less technology. (A version of this focused on customer references was used very successfully by Beverly Chase and the BEA marketing team)
Instead of arming your reps with the new and improved power point presentation, design a white board talk. Script it with questions and discussion points instead of spiel. The result is a conversation where customers contribute ideas, and the content evolves based on the here-and-now in the room, and not what marketing thought up a month ago back at corporate.
More ideas about how to transform traditional marketing tools into Marketing 2.0 vehicles.
3. Websites – Don’t hide customer feedback and support in a corner of your site. Place feature request and comment links right on product pages, so that customers can respond immediately to the content they see. Asking a question gets the customer more engaged than downloading a white paper. Involve product management and engineering in responding to the queries. It’s a great way to for them to touch the customers they otherwise rarely or never see. Post the most interesting questions and answers or turn them into additional content.
4. Press releases – What if your PR people became your customers’ and partners PR people? Lots of stories would best be told by someone other than a vendor. (And would be more likely to get picked up for coverage.) Build relationships with your customers’ and partners PR departments to understand how and where they want to be seen, and how talking about your relationship can help with that. Have your PR staff assist partners and customer with replying to PR opportunities.
5. Webinars – Yes, by now, this is a “traditional” marketing tool. But many companies tend to make webinars too one-directional. Use all the interactive tools (and the many webinar hosting services that offer them). Polls, chat, and Q&A are the common set. Use surveys both before and after your webinar. And don’t limit the surveys to questions about the webinar like the all too familiar “Did you find this useful?” Instead, ask questions that help you understand customers or that customers will be interested in too. The latter gives you an excuse for a follow-up contact that actually delivers value.
Have you tried these or other ways to engage customers in conversations? Share them in your comment!
Read More
Turn Marketing into Conversations – Part 1
Turn Marketing into Conversations – Part 3
Social networking channels are not the only way to make your marketing efforts more interactive. While you experiment with social media, you can make traditional marketing methods conversational too.
Getting customers to contribute to the substance in your marketing content, events, products will raise the value and trust customers place in them. Dan Ariely, author of Predictably Irrational, demonstrates that “labor enhances affection for its results.”
This week I’ll be posting a series of ideas on adding interaction and soliciting active customer engagement and contribution through traditional marketing tools. Here are a few to start off.
- Value proposition and messaging – Starting with the obvious here: when crafting your claims of benefits, value, and ROI, ask your customers what benefits they’ve actually received. Use these results to create your messages about benefits and value. Then go back and ask customers if they “buy” the story you tell about how your product leads to business results. You’ll have messages that really resonate, and your will have created references that back up your story because they ARE the story.
- Collateral and White papers – Create a Wiki instead of static product data sheets, brochures, and white papers. Provide a framework and some base content, then give customers the ability to contribute. You can moderate to ensure accuracy, of course. With customers contributing, you’ll have more complete, relevant, and trustworthy information.
Have you tried these or other ways to engage customers in conversations? Share them in your comment!
Read More
Turn Marketing into Conversations – Part 2
Turn Marketing into Conversations – Part 3
