In a recent article by McKinsey titled “The Basics of Business-to-Business Sales Success” (May 2010; http://bit.ly/ddKQHh), McKinsey states B2B customers say they care most about product and price, but what they really want is a great sales experience. While many focus on the sales experience after the initial contact, don’t forget to manage the experience from first contact backwards to avoid being eliminated prematurely.
It’s a known fact that many buyers are using online resources deeper into the sales cycle – making themselves available to the sales staff sometimes only after they have already eliminated some of the competition. Attention to gaining an early understanding of the person and delivering the right experience is critical to ensuring your sales team gets an opportunity to do their thing.
Where I deviate from the McKinsey article is using a schedule to dictate communication frequency rather than the value of the communication or allowing the customer to have control over the process. In my 15+ years of sales and marketing executive experience, customers never once followed my timeline. Marketing automation tools (such as Marketo) and social media tools allow the prospect to control communication frequency. By allowing prospects to either speed up or slow down their online experience and ensuring you are providing content that is meaningful to their job title/industry/company size/stage in the sales cycle, you stand a significantly better chance of not getting eliminated before the race ever begins. To be clear, highly valuable/relevant content can be more effective than a schedule in providing a great user experience.
Ramifications:
1. Your life will be considerably easier if you use a dynamic web form that allows you to ask a limited number of different questions at each of the first few touch points. This approach is better than asking a lot of questions at once (which will drive away some good prospects early on). This will allow you to know the person well enough to direct pertinent, meaningful information to them. There are a number of technologies that can do this.
2. I found post-event surveys helpful in going beyond questions that you can ask on a form. Using a strong incentive, I was able to get 48% of 2,400 attendees of an American Marketing Association webinar to fill out a form and tell me things like how they intended to use the subject of the webinar, if and when they were considering a purchase, if the project was funded, etc.
3. I have also found success at identifying the stages a lead goes through prior to being “sales ready,” identifying triggers that allowed me to know when a prospect was in each stage, and developing collateral assets for each of those stages.
Monday, July 26, 2010
Wednesday, April 21, 2010
The Case for Social Media Monitoring
In response to overwhelming demand, I’ve written this to serve as a resource for those looking to justify the budget and resources needed to add social media monitoring to their existing customer feedback / market research programs. All the organizations and corporations listed herein are trademarks of those respective companies.
A Case Study: Will the customer feedback found in social media really help drive revenues?
In 2009, Domino’s Pizza had a problem. Pizza deliveries were down 6% compared to 2008 and although they ranked first in convenience and price, they finished dead last in Brand Key’s consumer taste preference test.[i] Consumers complained about their 50-year-old recipe with comments like their crust tasted like cardboard and their sauce tasted like ketchup. Ironically social media made their problems worse when an infamous video hit YouTube of Domino’s employees doing disgusting things with the pizza ingredients. Changing their core product was risky. The only other major brand to change their core product in recent memory was Coca-Cola – a change which had to be undone due to a consumer revolt.
Domino’s embraced social media including YouTube[ii], Facebook, Twitter (hash tag #newpizza) other venues to solicit feedback about their new formula. They even invited their biggest food blogger antagonists to give public feedback about the change in formula. The feedback was made famous with a series of TV commercials where the negative feedback was read to company employees and executives.
The results? In March 2010, they reported that US sales actually grew by 1.4% while overseas sales grew 3.9%, representing $23.6 million in profits. Earlier in March their stocks shot up 5%[iii].
Times have changed. Social media contains customer feedback that you cannot solicit in surveys. We’re not suggesting you do away with your surveys. But consider the following:
Consumers spend nearly as much time watching TV as they do on the Internet. And what are they doing online? Increasingly, they are researching purchase decisions (97% of consumers[iv]). The vast majority of consumers now trust product reviews over corporate marketing. And there are a lot of reviews to choose from. 73% of consumers post product or brand reviews on sites like Amazon.com, Facebook, or Twitter and 52% of consumers blogged about a brand’s product or service[v]. Compare this to the number of your customers who actually take time to fill out your surveys. Research shows that on average, only 4% of your dissatisfied customers will take the time to fill out a survey.
Social media allows you to influence the customer experience. How important is this? 65%[vi] of consumers had a digital experience that changed their opinion about a brand. Of that, 97% of consumers reported their online experience influenced their purchase decision and 96% were likely to recommend the brand to their friends[vii]. Building on this, 64% of consumers report making a first purchase from a brand because of a digital experience[viii]
Technology has changed your customer. Your customer is about to change your company. The CMO Council reports that 58% of marketing executives say that the Internet and social networks have changed customer expectations for their brand[ix].
Capturing the feedback found in social media is no longer a luxury. It’s a competitive advantage.
25% of companies are already using Twitter for customer feedback and 27% of companies are using Twitter for customer service[x]. Econsultancy reports that 86% of companies are spending more on social media in 2010 than in 2009[xi]. By the end of 2010, virtually all chief marketing officers plan to incorporate a broader range of customer content sources including customer reviews (59% increase) and Twitter (407% increase) to influence product decisions[xii].
As demonstrated with the Domino’s example above, social media is entering the realms of legitimate ROI. The CMO Club reports that 81% of chief marketing officers expect to link up to 10% of their annual revenues to their social media investments in 2010[xiii].
Allowing your employees to leverage social media will not destroy productivity. Consider the following:
Research shows that 89% of US and global employers say they have NOT been negatively affected by allowing access to social media at work[xiv].
Conclusion: Social media is now part of the customer feedback and market research worlds and the feedback found therein is important for creating a sustainable competitive advantage. You are more likely to find defecting customers in social media than with a survey – thereby giving your company a greater chance to rescue and up-sell / cross-sell that customer. There is now sufficient evidence to show that adding the feedback found in social media to your existing feedback / market research programs can directly link to company revenues.
[i] USA Today. Domino’s Pizza delivers change in its core pizza recipe. Bruce Horovitz. http://www.usatoday.com/money/industries/food/2009-12-16-dominos16_ST_N.htm
[ii] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AH5R56jILag
[iii] NYDailyNews.com. New Domino’s pizza recipe doubles quarterly profits. http://www.nydailynews.com/money/2010/03/03/2010-03-03_a_recipe_for_success.html
[iv] http://feed.razorfish.com/downloads/Razorfish_FEED09_Webinar.pdf.
[v] http://feed.razorfish.com/downloads/Razorfish_FEED09_Webinar.pdf.
[vi] http://feed.razorfish.com/downloads/Razorfish_FEED09_Webinar.pdf.
[vii] http://feed.razorfish.com/downloads/Razorfish_FEED09_Webinar.pdf.
[viii] http://feed.razorfish.com/downloads/Razorfish_FEED09_Webinar.pdf.
[ix] http://www.marketingcharts.com/direct/companies-ignore-customer-feedback-fail-to-track-wom-7789/cmo-council-satmetrix-customer-voice-ways-measure-analyze-experiences-january-2009jpg/
[x] Marketing Charts: http://www.marketingcharts.com/interactive/86-of-companies-plan-social-media-budget-bumps-11248/
[xi] http://www.marketingcharts.com/interactive/86-of-companies-plan-social-media-budget-bumps-11248/
[xii] http://www.marketingcharts.com/interactive/cmos-seek-better-metrics-for-social-media-revenue-linkage-11311/
[xiii] http://www.marketingcharts.com/interactive/cmos-seek-better-metrics-for-social-media-revenue-linkage-11311/
[xiv] http://www.marketingcharts.com/interactive/small-businesses-use-social-media-to-pursue-customers-12010/
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